There appeares to be a major problem on Warner Bros latest release of The Matrix on Blu-Ray. Possibly an encode problem, possibly a bad replication error, but either way it should have been caught in QC before the disc was released. It's a pretty bad error that anyone should have been able to see...

Before I get into it, some details about Revolutions: Apparently, in a grand effort of being cheap (despite charging over $100 for the box set), WB has opted to just use the same VC1 encode they used on the HD-DVD released a while back. The entire contents of the disc only fill 34 GB of the 50 GB of disc space available to them (so it appears at least a little extra content was added... I don't have the HD-DVD, so I can't say for sure what, might just be additional foreign languages.). The VC1 file for the film itself is only about 13.4 GB. They could have re-encoded the film and DOUBLED the bitrate of the VC1 file and it would have still fit...

Anyway, on to the real problem. There is a horrendous encoding error in the movie at abut 1:45:46 into the film. It appears a little different on different players, as shown below. Some players (like the PS3) choose to skip over these frames completely, so while you don't see the blocking, Neo's foot suddenly jumps from about Smith's waist to well over his head in one frame. There's a lot of lightening and flashing going on, so it's not incredibly obvious exactly what's happening, but it definitely 'doesn't look right' even to the average person.