A/V Veteran

Ever had the experience of surfing the web and finding a link to a site that you never knew existed? OK, there are a lot of sites most of us never knew existed. But if that site is endlessly fascinating and useful to you, that’s a different story. I can't recall how I first came across bluraystats.com, but I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.

I’m sure that there are a few missing entries in a statistical effort this huge, but the site lists virtually every Blu-ray disc ever released. And that’s not even the half of it. It lets you filter them out according to one or more categories: Title, List Price, Studio, Amazon Price (including a selection for titled under $15), Codec, Bonus View, Capacity, BD Live (now there’s a blast from the past!), Audio, Windows Digital Copy, Release Date, and iTunes Digital Copy.

There are 14,499 total listings (take that, Netflix), though only about 48% of them come from eight major studios. The winner in the latter is Warner (one of the earliest supporters of the Blu-ray format, if memory serves) with 1894 titles. Fox is next with 969. There are 9063 titles with lossless audio in some form. DTS-HD Master Audio leads the pack with 6825 releases, compared to 1394 for Dolby TrueHD. The latter is more than I would have expected given that I’ve often had trouble locating a Dolby TrueHD title in my collection for a test requiring this codec. I won’t have that problem again; all I need to do is head for this site.

The same applies to uncompressed linear PCM (784 releases), or Dolby Atmos (89 titles). Want to know if there are any linear PCM titles with 24-bit and 96kHz encoding? No problem. Select Lossless 96kHz under audio and click the Filter button. You’ll find 32 listings for 24-bits, 96kHz. Most of them are music (some with video) in either DTS-HD Master Audio or Dolby True HD. The most well known non-musical title here is Baraka. There’s also The Right Stuff, listed at 96kHz but without a specified bit rate.

There are even six listings for 196kHz audio, all but one of them specified at 24-bits as well. Four of them are music, but two are movies: Casablanca (listed as Dolby Digital 1.0 mono at 192kHz, no bit rate specified) and Akira (Dolby TrueHD, 24-bit, 192kHz).

One shortcoming in the Filter options is that there’s no selection for audio-only Blu-rays. To tell for certain, find a musical title on the list that you’re interested in, then go to Amazon and look for the Blu-ray Audio designation. I suspect that many audio-only titles may not be on the Blu-ray Stats list. In addition, there’s no category as yet for Ultra HD Blu-rays.

When I checked for those Dolby Atmos titles I found many recent releases, such as 10 Cloverfield Lane, 13: Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and Divergent, confirming that the list is updated regularly. I hope that blu-raystats.com continues to keep it current. It’s an invaluable tool.