Magnolia and Magnet have set Stephen Kijak’s We Are X for Blu-ray and DVD release on 4/25.

Shout! and Scream Factory’s Streets of Fire: Collector’s Edition, Virus, and The Naked Cage are all now available for pre-order on Amazon. You can find the cover art (and pre-order links) below.

Scream Factory has also announced the Blu-ray release of Island of Terror (1966) starring Peter Cushing and The Evictors (1979). Street dates are TBA for the first half of 2017.

Broad Green Pictures has set New Life for release on DVD and Digital HD on 3/7.

On the hardware front, Sony Electronics has announced that its UBP-X800 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Player will retail for just $299.99. It’s available for pre-order now on Amazon at this link. The unit is expected to begin shipping in March, and it comes with an offer for two free Sony movies on the format.

And speaking of hardware, we’ve learned a little bit more about what the requirements will be for PCs to play 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray content. Some are obvious: Windows 10, a 4K UHD-compatible optical disk drive, a 4K display with HDMI 2.0a input and HDCP 2.2 support, and playback software that will handle UHD Blu-ray playback (like PowerDVD 17, eventually). But some are more specific and hardware based: a PC motherboard/processor combination that supports AACS 2.0 and (SGX) Intel Software Guard Extensions (some Intel Skylake and all the new Kaby Lake processors are certified to do so), as well as a GPU that has an HDMI 2.0a output with HDCP 2.2 and AACS2 support. Right now, very few GPUs (if any) do support AACS 2.0. We’re working to corroborate more on this, but the above should give you a general idea.

We’ll leave you with a look at the Blu-ray and 4K cover artwork for a number of the titles mentioned above. Click on the covers to pre-order them each on Amazon.com (which helps to support The Bits – and thank you for doing so!)...

Stay tuned…

- Bill Hunt(@BillHuntBits)