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Must be a holiday coming. The DVD shelves are full of outlandish boxes packed with all manner of gewgaws, all the better to make you buy a favourite film for the second or third time.

If the romantic on your list has a soft spot for Casablanca, for example — and who doesn't? — Casablanca Ultimate Collector's Edition supplements a previous special edition of the 1942 classic with a passport holder, a 48-page photo book and a documentary about studio boss Jack Warner. If the conspiracy theorist on your list loves Oliver Stone's JFK, JFK: Ultimate Collector's Edition yokes a recent special edition to a new documentary on the Kennedy dynasty and facsimiles of John F. Kennedy's letters and inauguration address.

Of course, the biggest question this season is whether to give regular DVDs or Blu-ray discs, now that Blu-ray has defeated HD-DVD as the reigning high-definition format. Blu-ray players will play regular DVDs as well as Blu-ray discs, but regular DVD players won't play Blu-ray discs. So there will be tough choices. The regular-DVD "ultimate collector's edition" of A Christmas Story comes in a metal box with an apron, a recipe book and five cookie cutters, one in the shape of the lamp resembling a shapely female leg. The Blu-ray edition comes in a metal box with Christmas-tree lights shaped like, yes, leg lamps. Nobody said giving presents was easy.

Here are 10 tips, divided by category.

Blu-ray bells and whistles

Beyond their sharper picture and sound, Blu-ray discs hold a great deal more information, so optional picture-in-picture commentaries are increasingly common. With Pan's Labyrinth, director Guillermo del Toro appears in a corner of the screen to show off his sketches and discuss the film. The Blu-ray disc of del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army is even more adventurous, with three picture-in-picture options: a director's notebook, a tour of the set and a "Schufften Goggle View," which shows scenes at various stage of development. With the soldiers-versus-giant-bugs film Starship Troopers, director Paul Verhoeven and others discuss whether the movie is fascistic or an ironic deconstruction of fascism. Actor Neil Patrick Harris says Verhoeven filmed one scene so many times that co-star Denise Richards cried.

Chase films, for the action-lover interested less in plausibility than in thrills

In Timur ( Night Watch) Bekmambetov's Wanted, Angelina Jolie introduces James McAvoy to the wild world of the hitman while dangling from the front of a speeding car. Harrison Ford belies his age as the returning adventurer in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And villain Paul Giamatti makes a great foil for Clive Owen in Shoot 'em Up, which doesn't have a plausible bone in its body and doesn't stop for breath as awesome stunt follows stunt.

Animated films

Top of the list is WALL-E, the gorgeous tale of a lonely trash compactor in search of a companion. The Blu-ray version has a pic-in-pic commentary by the director and another by four colleagues, who say the film was originally called WAL-E until someone realized it would be pronounced "whale." Also worthy is Watership Down: Deluxe Edition, a 1978 film of the Richard Adams novel about dislocated bunnies.

Silent films

Buster Keaton's extraordinary 1927 comedy-drama The General has a would-be Confederate soldier scrambling to retrieve a locomotive stolen by Union soldiers in the U.S. Civil War, but it's really a vehicle for Keaton's timing, athleticism and power of invention. Kino's The General: Ultimate 2-Disc Edition offers three separate musical scores. Next week brings the Murnau, Borzage and Fox Collection, with 12 silent films made by F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage at what was then Fox Studios. Titles include a remastered version of Murnau's unmissable Sunrise (1927).

Documentaries

Out next Tuesday, Man on Wire revisits a death-defying 1974 stunt by Philippe Petit, who spent an hour illegally performing on a tightrope stretched between the towers of the World Trade Center. For Animals in Love, Jean-Pierre Bailly and his team spent 500 days shooting 170 species of animals in 16 countries. They condensed the results into an 85-minute French documentary showing animals wooing and mating to the music of Philip Glass; the making-of extra is in French only. Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens follows the celebrity photographer from childhood through her long stint at Rolling Stone to her work with Vanity Fair (until then, "I didn't realize that people had a good side and a bad side") and the death of her partner, Susan Sontag.

Short films

The series Cinema16 has previously focused on European films, British films and American films. Cinema16 World Short Films (www.cinema16.org) devotes two discs to early short works by the likes of Senegal's Ousmane Sembene, New Zealand's Jane Campion and South Korea's Park Chan-Wook, whose tale of a morgue attendant and a husband and wife disputing the identity of a woman killed in a shopping-mall collapse has a warped touch of CSI to it. Canada gets three look-ins: Guy Maddin's My Dad Is 100 Years Old, written by Isabella Rossellini about her filmmaker father Roberto; Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski's Madame Tutli-Putli, a fever dream with stop-motion puppets; and Sylvain ( The Triplets of Belleville) Chomet's delightful animated film The Old Lady and the Pigeons, a co-production between Canada and France.

Television

Here the boxes grow huge. The complete series of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood and Get Smart are out, and hooray for all of them, but for supplementary toys it's hard to beat The Lone Ranger: 75th Anniversary Collector's Edition, distributed by Alliance Films. The 78 black-and-white episodes from 1949 through 1951 look fine, with Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels as the masked man and Tonto, and there's even an episode of Lassie in which the Lone Ranger appeared. But spare a moment for the enclosed comic book, trading cards and 84-page booklet of photos and text. Hi-yo, Silver! Away!

More television

If you're buying for the lover of TV comfort food, Perry Mason Season 3 Volume 2 offers 14 episodes from 1960 of the great courtroom drama with Raymond Burr. The writing wasn't as sharp in another 1960s series, Burke's Law, but Gene Barry did a nice job as a millionaire chief of detectives in Los Angeles who interviewed a raft of celebrity suspects each week before nailing the culprit. Among the guest stars in Burke's Law: Season 1 Volume 2 are Buster Keaton, John Cassavetes, William Shatner and Jayne Mansfield.

James Bond

The three-disc "collector's edition" of Casino Royale (2006) is stuffed with bonus features about the film, Bond and creator Ian Fleming, and transports us to those halcyon days before Quantum of Solace, back when Bond (Daniel Craig) still took a modicum of enjoyment from what he did for a living.

Science fiction

One good thing about remakes is that it gives studios an excuse to rerelease the originals. The Day the Earth Stood Still: Special Edition (1951) is the classic tale of an alien visitor (Michael Rennie) prepared to use violence to secure peace. Copious extras include two commentaries, an isolated musical score (by the great Bernard Herrmann, employing the otherworldly sound of the theremin) and, inevitably, a preview of the forthcoming remake with Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly. Consider as well Dark City: Director's Cut, a spooky sci-fi film noir with Connelly, Rufus Sewell and William Hurt.

Also of note: The Dark Knight, the latest Batman film, is out next week. And if the recipient of your gifts will accept a rain check, the marvellous 1946 British fantasy A Matter of Life and Death (a.k.a. Stairway to Heaven) is slated for a DVD release on Jan. 6.