New to Blu: October 20-26

How to get the best out of your Blu-ray player? Pop in a copy of How to Train Your Dragon, which goes on sale on Wednesday.

The DreamWorks ‘toon about a puny Viking teenager who doesn’t fit in until he confronts one of the village’s most feared dragons looks like being one of the year’s top demo discs.

It’s won five-star raves for its video and audio from such sites as Blu-ray.com, which hailed it as “the perfect demonstration of what today’s technology is capable of creating …

“Fine detail is nothing short of breathtaking, with every object seen in the film — well-worn armour, wooden planks, hair, dragon scales, and any number of assorted items — revealing every single nuance that not only makes for a gorgeous Blu-ray image but a window that looks into the world of modern computer animation.”

Hi-Def Digest was just as fulsome in its praise for Walt Disney’s HD transfer of Beauty and the Beast, also due Wednesday, which it summed up as “tremendous, fantastic, awe-inspiring, beautiful … I think I could just sit here with a thesaurus open for the rest of this video portion using ever synonym of ‘amazing’ that I can find”.

The rest of the week’s releases combine more classics — Breaker Morant, George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead trilogy — with newcomers Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, I Love You Too, Leap Year and Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam.

There’s also Lost: The Final Season, which The Digital Bits rated 19/20 for its video and 18/20 for its audio: “a great Blu-ray experience from start to finish …

“Lost was the first major new television show to hit Blu-ray, starting with Season 3, and it’s continued to set the standard for TV material on the format since. I’d bet that no fan will walk away disappointed with the video quality of this series on Blu-ray.

“And while Lost has always been an excellent 5.1 auditory experience as well, the density and mixing tricks in the audio department have really improved.”