And still no HD for PPV boxing or UFC? Lame.

I'd say that they should've quit after season 11. And aren't the old episodes only mastered on video?

An IMAX camera ain't just loud, it's OMG TURN THAT CRAP OFF LOUD. Most big budget movies do ADR but Nolan prefers to get the most out of the performances on location rather than doing ADR because there are many variables in ADR.

Here's my list (we're talking about video quality folks, not movie quality):
Ratatouille
I, Robot (the best transfer of a movie shot on film to HD media yet)
Red Cliff (Hong Kong Import)
Casino Royale
Enchanted
The Descent (1st BR pressing used AVC encode with beautiful grain structure, all other pressings are MPEG-2 and DNR'd)
How the West was Won (Flat version, Smilebox version has slight EE)
Doomsday
Blade Runner: The Final Cut
300
Resident Evil: Extinction
The Other Boleyn Girl

The Dark Knight does deserve a place on my list but only for the IMAX scenes. The IMAX scenes I can say are absolutely jaw-dropping and among the best on Blu-ray but when it switches to 35mm, it's like watching a DVD upconvert. WB really screwed up on that one.

Hey plonk420,

As I know, it's only recently (post-2006) that most studio films are mixed down at 24-bit/48 kHz. Pre-2006, only the biggest studio blockbusters (i.e. Spider Man 2, Pirates of the Caribbean 1) were mixed down at 24/48.

Don't listen to those guys at AVSForum, they don't know what they're talking about. What I'm really angry about is that our workflow (location sound/ADR/SFX/stems/mixdown/mastering) on the Dark Knight was completely 24/48 and yet WB decided to use 16/48 downconverted "masters" for the TrueHD track of the film. I'm also disappointed with those Blu-ray shots with EE because the DI of the film looked absolutely jaw-dropping.

"Sony is just as bad, but no one rags on them. Nearly everything they release is also 16bit." - Mike P

What? Sony has been releasing most of their latest titles with 24-bit PCM/Dolby TrueHD/DTS-MA sound.

Here's a few titles:
Hancock
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
30 Days of Night
Dogma
Drillbit Taylor
The Fall
Gattaca
Immortal Beloved
Made of Honor
Monty's Python's Life of Brian
Paprika
The Professionals
Resident Evil Trilogy
Run Lola Run
Spider Man 2
Spider Man 3
Surf's Up
We Own the Night
Youth Without Youth

The reason why Dark Knight is special is because it was shot, mixed, and mastered at 24-bit and WB gives us 16-bit downconverts for the "lossless" soundtrack. They might as well just give us only the lossy Dolby Digital track.

As a sound guy on this film, I don't understand why WB didn't give them the 24-bit/48 kHz masters. Batman Begins also had a 24-bit master but yet WB decided to release the downscaled 16-bit version for the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray.

And for LB saying that there should be a minimum requirement for "96 kHz" in audio quality for Blu-ray, most American films are shot with 24-bit/48 kHz wave files with the post-production done in the same bit depth and sampling rate.

Older films (i.e. before digital location sound mixing) can be done even higher than 24/48. The recent BR release of Baraka as a DTS-MA 24/96 track as well as the Tai Seng release of Peter Chan's Perhaps Love. The upcoming BR release of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira will also be coming out with a 24/96 track next year.