All right… just a quick one today with three things for you:

First, our own Russell Hammond has updated the Release Dates & Artwork section with all the latest Blu-ray, DVD and Video Game cover artwork and Amazon.com pre-order links, as usual.

And Jeff Kleist has turned in a new installment of his The 3rd Dimension column featuring his thoughts on the theatrical experience of seeing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in HFR 3D. There are lots of mixed reviews of HFR 3D out there and Jeff does his best to try to puzzle out why. I’ve also added a couple comments on my own HFR viewings. We’ve each seen the film twice now in different display formats (IMAX, RealD, etc) and almost every screening seems to offer a different experience. Gizmodo has a piece up on this subject as well.

Finally today, we’re getting reports from readers that there may be an audio issue on some copies of Sony’s new Total Recall (2012) Blu-ray. Depending on the player used, viewers are reporting audio drop-outs near the beginning of the film and bursts of static around 70 and 105 minutes in. I’ve watched the Extended Cut via my Oppo BDP-83 and had no problems, but others are having issues on select Oppo and Sony units among others. It seems to happen most commonly when the player’s audio is set to bitstream as opposed to PCM. We’ll try to look into the matter and see what’s up – if there’s a firmware issue or simply bad discs in need of a replacement program. When Sony gets back to us we’ll let you know.

Back tomorrow – stay tuned!

- Bill Hunt