For millions of viewers, the DVD was the only way to own the film without a high-speed internet connection or a Blu-ray player. Furthermore, the inclusion of commentary and deleted scenes—even in reduced form—preserved the “director-audience” pedagogical function that streaming services (with their ephemeral, ad-hoc bonus content) have largely abandoned.
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Compared to the Blu-ray’s 1080p AVC video and DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1, the DVD suffers from visible compression artifacts, particularly in the film’s “mirror dimension” and kaleidoscopic city-folding sequences. Nevertheless, Disney’s encoding maintained consistent bitrates (approx. 5–7 Mbps) to minimize macroblocking, prioritizing playability across older players. For millions of viewers, the DVD was the