Entourage: The Complete Eighth Season Blu-ray Review

Posted June 12th, 2012 by Brendan Surpless

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Aspect Ratio: 1:78:1
Video Codec: AVC MPEG-4
Resolution: 1080p/24 (23.976Hz)
Audio Codec: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, French DTS Digital Surround 5.1, Spanish DTS Digital Surround 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH, French, Latin Spanish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish
Subtitles Color: White
Region: A (B? C?)
Rating: TV-MA
Run Time: 240 Mins.
Discs: 2 (2 x Blu-ray)
Studio: HBO Home Entertainment
Blu-ray Release Date: June 12th, 2012
List Price: $49.99

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Overall

The Series

Video Quality

Audio Quality

Supplemental Materials

Click thumbnails for high-resolution 1920X1080p screen captures

(All Blu-rayDefinition.com screen captures are lightly compressed with lossy JPEG at 100% quality setting and are meant as a general representation of the content. They do not fully reveal the capabilities of the Blu-ray format)

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The Series

Entourage, in it’s Eighth and final season, continues the high-and-low stories of Vince (Adrian Grenier), E (Kevin Connolly), Drama (Kevin Dillion), and Turtle (Jerry Ferrara). As this season opens, Vince has successfully completed rehab after being caught with cocaine at the end of the 7th season. Vince wants to move out of the acting business, and into the producing gig. E continues to build his own agency. Drama wishes he had the success he once had, and just may. Turtle, well Turtle has a few ventures of his own, some of which may ultimately change him as a person. While it was sad to see this series ultimately come to a close, I will say that Ellin and his group of creators have ended it on quite the high note.

Video Quality

Entourage: The Complete Eighth Season arrives with a 1:78:1 framed, AVC MPEG-4 encoded transfer, which for all purposes looks solid throughout. Showcasing the Hollywood landscapes in all its glory, the series color palette has always had a kind of bright, hot look and feel to it. Despite this, the transfer holds a good amount of detail. Flesh tones, contrast levels and facial close ups are excellent. Texture detail also is quite impressive. Blacks are deep and inky, with no instance of smearing. All in all, this is a fine effort from HBO.

Audio Quality

The series closes itself out with the same DTS-HD Master Audio track that has shown up on the 6^th and 7^th season releases. Dialogue is well reproduced throughout with no instance of dropout. Atmosphere, depending on the scene, can vary from quite active (during the highway driving where background cars, noise can be heard) to rather quite (some of the house chats). Musical selections do open up the sound field more adding in a good amount of LFE and surround activity. Pans between rears are invisible as well. Given HBO’s track record, this is another solid effort from them.

Supplemental Materials

The supplements provided on this release are:

Disc 2:

Hollywood Sunset: A Farewell to Entourage – This runs 28:33 and is a sit down conversation with Series Creator Doug Ellin and other members of the cast and crew. Of particular interest was Mark Whalberg speaking on how his rise to fame in Hollywood inspired the show.

The Definitive Word

Overall:

While the series may have faltered a bit during its 8 seasons, I can’t fault the way this season ended as it sets us up for the eventual movie. HBO, as expected, has delivered another solid technical front with fine video/audio. This comes Well Recommended.