Painfully slow. That’s how I’d describe the long wait between Bandai Visual’s releases of Freedom episodes, where each one comes out about two months after the last. Continuing in this tradition, Freedom 4 has been slated for a February 26 release, with Freedom 5 to follow the customary two months later on April 22.

If you’ve followed the site for a while, then you already know I’m invested in this series and look forward to each new installment. These discs are notable because they’re the only anime series on HD DVD in North America (there are more in Japan, naturally), and also because they use the TWIN format disc technology where the DVD and HD DVD versions of a movie are on the same side, but on separate disc layers. Unlike the combo discs from Universal and Warner, you don’t have to flip these over to choose between the HD DVD and DVD versions.

There’s actually a third cool feature on these titles, and that’s their unique implementation of HDi where the picture-in-picture (PiP) commentary window can be moved, resized, and made transparent. If you’ve ever used PiP on an HD DVD before, then you might appreciate how nice this feature ends up being. I don’t think it requires any extra weight-lifting on the part of the HD DVD player to do these extra things with the PiP, and I look forward to seeing it on more discs in the future.

The way that Bandai Visual’s discs get distributed has changed in the last few months, and that makes these discs just a little harder to find. While just about all HD DVD discs are available via Amazon and Netflix, Freedom 3 wound up only being available through anime sites. At this moment, that story remains the same for the upcoming volumes, and you’ll have to head over to the company’s official online store or another anime dealer for preordering.