I watched the HD DVD again last night to decide if I want to grab this or not.

I'm still satisfied... and not that anxious to sit through an even longer version of the flick.

but the included aquatic dinosaur attack is cool

the added scenes make it 3hrs 10 min of movie time another 10 minutes of credits.
It went by quick enough.
I liked the extra scenes and barely noticed a difference except for the river and the "rhino"
extra scenes.
the chapter marker shows what scenes were added and what ones were extended.

my favorite sound scenes were near the end when kong is rampaging
through the streets and the planes buzzing kong on the Empire Building.

I was always a fan of the film, and didn't get too bothered by its length to begin with. But for anyone worried about the extended cut feeling even longer, I can honestly say that it's among those rare longer cuts that allows the film a chance to breathe. I think that the new pacing makes it go by quicker. Nothing is swapped out, but parts of the movie that may have slugged along for you (like around the bug pit), are now bumpered by character moments, humor, and added action which really helps this section in particular. It really breezes by now, and I'm so happy that this cut made it to Blu-ray, no more disc swapping!

I read on blu-ray.com that the disc size is 38.8 GB. 11 GB of wasted space.

Yep. If Universal cared, we could have had tons of extras from the (very stale) DVD versions (even in SD!) but nope...couldn't be bothered. Instead, they tossed on a Commentary track and called it a day.

Could've had fewer visible compression artifacts, too.

Were there any "visible compression artifacts" on the HD DVD, which crammed the same movie into 30GB?

This right here is why I don't think I want to upgrade. I have both the 2-disc theatrical and 3-disc extended DVDs. Both have extensive bonus content of thier own. I only want to upgrade DVDs if I can get rid of the DVDs, and these I cannot. At least, not the 3-disk.

They may be saving space for a double dip with the same encoding. I think Sony did it with The Fifth Element, which uses about 33GB and includes an unnecessary PCM track (since it has TrueHD too).

Sony was forced to due to their crap-job on the previous release when the format launched. Since the original had PCM, they opted to include that as well as TrueHD since more and more players were able to decode that (and they were offering exchanges to customers who bought the crap-job one. Giving them a replacement with an audio format they couldn't decode would suck).

This is King Kong's double-dip. The film is nearly 3 years old and I can't imagine Universal re-visiting it anytime soon when they still another 150+ HD DVD's to bring over plus new Day and Dates. They could have tossed on extras onto the 50GB disc or they could have tossed them onto a BD25 (hell, even a DVD with a Digital Copy like HellBoy II). They didn't. Don't worry, Street Fighter is packed to the brim with extras

this is an upgrade for me.
IT's worth it because the pq and audio is well beyond the dvds already released.

aintnosin.....exactly

If I have to hang on the DVD for extras, I will. I buy Blu-ray for the PQ and AQ. If the LOTR Blus don't come with all the extras as the Extended DVDs, I will definitely hang on those, too, but I will get the Blu-rays as well.

Yeah, I know why they included PCM. That was when they were transitioning to TrueHD and included both. I meant that when the SE comes out, it won't need the PCM track.

I'll be double/triple/whatever dipping for the improved pq and aq but I really hate having to own 3 copies of just this film, plus the Production Diaries. I'm running out of shelf space here!

OK, FINE! But I'm not paying release-day price for it.

I was in Target this morning and they had the shelf tag up. The price will be $19.99.

I stopped back in the same Target I was in this morning and had one of the red shirts go to the back and get King Kong. I had it in my hands. Unfortunately, when I got to the checkout, the cashier scanned the movie and I saw a notice on the screen say "do not sell this before 1/20". Argh!!!

I had gotten some titles early there before, but it appears that won't be happening anymore. Naturally I had to act completely surprised when they told me it doesn't come out until tomorrow.

Meijer had it on the shelf at 7:00 this morning. $19.99 there too. I'll wait until it gets to $10 - $15.

Seems like the U titles have been on sale around $15 or lower at Tower pretty frequently... I'll probably wait a bit.

Yeah, I'm just going to wait for the Columbia House BOGO for this since it was just added this morning.

Drove to my local Best Buy today to pick this up and they were out at 6:00 pm. WTF? Can't they stock enough to last one friggin day?

I don't know if this thing is selling like a beast or if Best Buy just didn't get many copies because I also went tonight and they were sold out. WTF indeed.

can anyone who purchaesed this on 9/20/09 confirm the dts-hd master? I dont have the proper reciever for the hd codecs so I relize I will only recieve the core of whatever is on disc but my reciever isnt switching to dts core either its displaying DD.

Same here. I'm super excited. I hope they have one really soon.