Last night the Cohen brothers No Country for Old Men snagged four Oscars including Best Picture. But the film that won big with the academy is also going to win big with home theaters when it’s finally released on March 11.

Another film that was widely considered the year’s best Michael Clayton that managed to eek out its own Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, Tilda Swinton. But the legal drama starring George Clooney has a very different transfer to Blu-ray.

No Country for Old Men appears on Blu-ray disc and DVD on March 11, it won’t be long out of movie theaters before it can make screenings at home theaters. But high-def home theater enthusiasts should pay special attention to what might be the best film ever transferred to a high-def disc.

The blood soaked thriller will feature an AVC Mpeg-4 video transfer to 1080P. It’s widely considered one of the best graphic transfers ever performed. It was done by Buena Vista / Disney that has plenty of experience with the Blu-ray format and it’s starting to show.

The audio treatment should be just as stunning as the video when HD ready home theaters get the new Cohen brothers epic into their disc trays. With a BD-50 release, that’s Blu-ray disc at dual density or 50 GB, studios have plenty of extra space to take up with uncompressed audio. And that’s exactly what Buena Vista did for this film. It boasts a PCM 5.1 audio track sampled at a deep 24bit at 48kHz. The presentation is compelling and a credit to the Blu-ray format just when it needs most to win over the mainstream.

Sadly, Michael Clayton which is already out on Blu-ray doesn’t fare as well with home theater. The video is standard fare with Microsoft’s own VC-1 codec for a high-def resolution at 1080P but the audio inexplicably suffers on Michael Clayton. Warner released the film on Blu-ray with only a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. That’s the same old audio codec used on standard definition DVD. No uncompressed PCM audio is available nor are any of the new high res audio codecs like TrueHD or DTS-HD to be found.

This year’s Oscar Best Picture comes at just the right time the new undisputed high-def format, it may also be the best quality Blu-ray disc yet.  

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under Media, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.