Disney Confirms Packaging Gaffe on 'At World's End' Blu-ray

An unusual packaging blunder had early adopters scratching their heads on the eve of Disney's highly anticipated 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End' Blu-ray release.

Due to hit stores today, the third flick in the 'Pirates' series is one of Disney's biggest Blu-ray guns of Q4, but as several eagle-eyed tipsters pointed out to us over the last few days, the back of the box promotes video specs with considerably less firepower than is the industry norm.

Specifically, the packaging for 'At World's End' indicates a 1080i/MPEG-4 encode for the main feature -- this, despite the fact that the high-profile release had been announced as sporting a full 1080p transfer. (Although 1080i is not unusual when it comes to supplemental material, true 1080p is standard for encoding of the main feature itself among major studio releases. Indeed, all of Disney's previous Blu-ray releases have featured full 1080p video.)

So what gives? We here at High-Def Digest received our own final copy of 'At World's End' last week from Disney, and after putting it through its paces on multiple players, we found the encode of the feature film to be true 1080p, contradicting the packaging.

We've since contacted Disney about the apparent labeling snafu, and a rep confirmed that copies of the release were indeed incorrectly marked as 1080i. At press time, the studio was not planning a recall of the mislabeled copies of 'At World's End,' but said that the error would be corrected on future pressings of the title.

This is not the first time that Disney has encountered rough waters with the 'Pirates' franchise on high-def. As we've previously reported, the studio's Blu-ray release of 'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl' suffered from framing issues that plans to fix the issue in future pressings, and will offer a disc exchange program for affected consumers.)

Packaging gaffe aside, our own Peter Bracke gave 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End' the thumbs up in his recently-posted review of the Blu-ray disc. To read Peter's complete review, click here.

See what people are saying about this story in our forums area, or check out other recent discussions.

Discs mentioned in this article: (Click for specs and reviews)

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Blu-ray)

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Blu-ray)