The first of seven planned DVDs in the series, 'Planet Earth: Oceania' is a beautiful disc. It's a DVD comprised of highresolution images of the Earth's coastlines, beaches, oceans and islands taken from space by the Space Shuttle and MIR Space Station. It presents these awesome images in a slideshow format, but instead of a single image filling the frame, it blows them up to larger than the screen size, and then pans around the photo so you can enjoy the detail.The video is presented in 16:9 widescreen, or 4:3 (letterbox or pan-andscan), and as each image is shown a caption appears so you know exactly what you're looking at.

One potential drawback to viewing this scenery - and one that totally depends on your personal tastes - is the Celtic soundtrack accompanying it.There are fifteen pieces of music on the 85 minute DVD, which is where the chapters have been created.Technically, the audio is superb with both Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS soundtracks available, but it does tend to get grating after a few repeats.

There are over 150 images on the DVD which comprise the slideshow, but a bonus is that these photos can also be accessed on a PC with a DVD-ROM.These are stored in low, medium and high resolution folders, and because they are royalty free you can use them for whatever you wish. Personally, I now have a great looking desktop.