The most recent of Zomba’s Backstreet Boys DVDs, Homecoming is, in fact, a recording of a concert in the band’s home town of Orlando Florida that was produced by and for the Showtime cable channel in the US - its original title, in fact, is Coming Home. The 88-minute concert takes in 17 songs, including all of the Boys’ hit singles up to this point (1999).

Staged in a large venue with a suitably gargantuan stage for the group to dance across, the show is very much a fans-only affair - despite the presence of quite a few heartfelt ballads, it’s unlikely older music fans will be able to take this especially seriously - and if you thought our friend A.J. was sounding a bit sleazy on the Night Out With The Backstreet Boys disc, prepare yourself for the next level. “Right now I wanna dedicate this song,� he says slinkily, “to all the beautiful, lovely… sexy ladies in MY house tonight.� It would appear that A.J. always introduces this particular song with a spot of sleaze. And why not? After all, the song’s called Lay Down Beside Me.

Concluding with a stage version of their Michael Jackson-inspired Everybody video clip, the Boys whip their audience into the expected frenzy; whether or not you’ll feel the same way probably depends on whether you’re a 14 year old schoolgirl or, like this reviewer, a 34 year-old cynic...

After the atrocious video quality of the earlier Night Out live DVD, this one comes as a pleasant surprise. Apparently shot and post-produced digitally and not suffering the NTSC-PAL conversion problems that the other two discs do, Homecoming actually looks very, very good. The full frame image is easily broadcast quality, with vibrant, rich colours and crisp, well-defined detail; while still not completely state of the art, it’s such a massive improvement over the two earlier discs that it’s like HDTV by comparison.

Audio’s another story, though. Once again, the Dolby Surround track is encoded in mono (in a Dolby Digital 2.0 stream) due, presumably, to an authoring error. And once again, the 5.1 track directs too much of its bass to the subwoofer track, making the audio sound thin when downmixed to two channels, as the bulk of this disc’s audience will be doing. Adding to those problems, the audio mix has been over-compressed dynamically and sounds flat as a result - a fact not helped by the mix itself, which places the lead vocals way, way back in the distance, swathed in an alarming amount of reverb. Overall, this is not a good sound mix at all.

Once again there are no extras - just animated menus.