This week The Hobbit finally started principle photography and a street date for the Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy on Blu-ray has finally been announced. The US release date is June 28 and the set is available for pre-order now. (This holds true for Canada, but release information for the UK or other areas has not yet been made available.)

Here's what Dom fans will want to know, as best as I can determine:  if you have the Extended Editions and the 2006 Limited editions, you have all the material on these discs, apart from the HD quality for the films themselves.

The release is actually a 15 disc mix of Blu-ray, for the discs containing the actual films, and DVD for extra features, with five discs per film. For every film, the first two discs are Blu-ray discs with the film and the four commentaries from Extended DVD edition (including the cast commentary with Dom). A second two are DVD discs which include the same special features included on the two extra discs from the DVD edition. (They may, in fact, be exact copies.) The final disc is DVD with a Costa Botes documentary previously released on the Limited Edition, a must-have for Dom fans.

What's new? A trailer for an upcoming LotR video game The War in the North and access through BD-Live to Internet content. That might be anything from exclusive or live content to links to IMDb. (I would guess the later, as no new content was announced, but you never know.)

Finally, buyers will have access to digital copies of the films. Unlike the Blu-ray release of the Theatrical Trilogy, in which the digital copy was included on the discs, you will need to download your digital copy of these films from the Internet (at least, according to Amazon). The quality and distribution method for the download were not explained in New Line's press release.

(For extras included on the Theatrical DVD sets, you'll still have to buy the Theatrical Blu-ray set.)

Here's a disc-by-disc breakdown. If you have questions or confusion, I strongly recommend you view Amazon's LotR editions chart about half way down this page.