I just received the Discover Atlas HD DVD box set from the DiscoveryStore in the mail yesterday.

The box set comes in a very nice looking leather (fake of course but looks nice) outer box. The cases for the individual episodes however are quite flimsy. They are the same height as the regular dvd cases but are slim digipaks with a slipcover. I was able to watch China: Revealed and Italy: Revealed yesterday night so here's a quick review of the video and audio.

China: Revealed was a little disappointing in terms of video. The transfer was very inconsistant. It went from looking very 3D to seeing lots of digital noise in the background. Some scenes just looked too soft and some of the wide scenery shots could have looked a lot better. Being a documentary the sound was adequate and very comprehensible.

Italy: Revealed was absolutely stunning in comparison. It had that pop you expect to see for such a recent documentary shot with HD cameras. Everything looked amazing.

I'm not sure why there was a huge difference in video quality between the two. The disc menus were encoded in MPEG2 but the actual features and special features were encoded in AVCMPEG4.

I'm a huge fan of documentaries but I have not seen this series on the DiscoveryHD channel so I'm not sure if it looked any better or worse than the discs. If you're a fan of this series or of documentaries in general, you should definitely pick this up. Either way it's great to have more content in HD.

Any subtitles?

I'm mostly interested in the Oz (I mean, Australia) disc. When you watch it please report your impressions.

TIA.

These shows were really well put together on discovery.

I missed China, but Italy and Brazil were both really well done and looked great. In brazil there was one show of a little girl at a easter celebration where she is standing in a balcony overlooking a church with confetti streaming behind her that was simply stunning.

Hopefully it looks as good in HDDVD.

looking forward to read your thoughts on the Aussie HD DVD.

Cheers

These shows were really well put together on discovery.

I missed China, but Italy and Brazil were both really well done and looked great. In brazil there was one show of a little girl at a easter celebration where she is standing in a balcony overlooking a church with confetti streaming behind her that was simply stunning.

Hopefully it looks as good in HDDVD.

I didn't with Brazil, the trasfer was terrible. The dark scenes on my home town of Sao Paulo had more sparkles than my christmas tree.
I hope the BD version be better or HDDVD/BD has a lot of splaining to do :D

These shows were really well put together on discovery.

I missed China, but Italy and Brazil were both really well done and looked great. In brazil there was one show of a little girl at a easter celebration where she is standing in a balcony overlooking a church with confetti streaming behind her that was simply stunning.

Hopefully it looks as good in HDDVD.

It didn't with Brazil, the trasfer was terrible. The dark scenes on my home town of Sao Paulo had more sparkles than my christmas tree.
I hope the BD version be better or HDDVD/BD has a lot of splaining to do :D

I was able to watch Brazil: Revealed last night and here are my thoughts. First off the entire disc in encoded in VC1. I'm not sure why they used a different codec from the first two that I watched. Overall I think the video quality was a little lower than Italy although some of the scenes from Carnival just seemed to pop right into my living room. There was also an option in this disc to choose from 5.1 or 2.0 in terms of sound. This was another great disc.

Hopefully Austrailia will be just as good.

Some of those scenes of Sao Paolo at night time were a little grainy but I don't think it was any different from the broadcast version.

I saw CHINA on DiscoveryHD and the video quality of the original is nowhere near the others in the first batch. A lot of it looked like it was not shot on HD (some looked like PAL converted as well) and then they were transferred to HD. Clearly, all of ITALY was sourced in HD, and it shows.

Eric

The box set comes in a very nice looking leather (fake of course but looks nice) outer box. The cases for the individual episodes however are quite flimsy. They are the same height as the regular dvd cases but are slim digipaks with a slipcover.

Can anyone confirm whether the cases for the individual releases (on Amazon for instance) have standard HD DVD cases or the ones described above? Thanks.