Heroes Season 3 - Sep 1, 2009

[Brandon K]

A couple oddities on this release, and seeing some random threads but no "Official" dedicated thread for the North America Blu-ray release of this season, I decided to start one.

Starting with the boring bit... Like many "early" Blu-ray releases, Seasons 1, 2, and 4 in Canada all appear to be direct imports from the US. Same non-bilingual packaging, same UPC barcodes, and they have US addresses for the Universal copyright statements. Season 3, however, specifically mentions that it's distributed by Universal Studios Canada and that it's Printed in Canada (on the bottom of the slipbox, which this site doesn't include in its scans), although the rest of the packaging is identical to the US release, including being non-bilingual and having the same UPC barcode... so I'm still assuming that it's the same as the US release.

Now onto the fun part...

The review on this site states the release is MPEG-4 AVC, as does DVD Beaver's review.

Meanwhile, reviews from High-Def Digest and DVD Talk state the release is VC-1.

Well, it turns out both are partly right, but both are partly wrong...

The 10 episodes split between Discs 1 and 4 are encoded as VC-1... and the remaining 15 episodes split between Discs 2, 3, and 5 are encoded as MPEG-4 AVC.

Unfortunately, this site doesn't have the ability to list a release as encoded in two different formats... but it's something I would have expected the review to highlight. (To be fair, none of the other sites reviewing this release caught onto it either.)

The authoring/mastering dates of the 5 discs range between June 17th and July 1st, 2009.

(Incidentally, Season 4 continues the strangeness. Discs 1 through 3 are all VC-1, while the last 4 episodes of the season on Disc 4 are MPEG-4 AVC.)

Does it really matter? No, but it's sure strange and it's details like this that drive me crazy when things are wrong or weirdly inconsistent.

If anyone has any insights on this, I'd love to hear about it!