Season One

 

BOX-ART

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The cover is a simple render of the first zombie we see in the show, not much else going on.

 

MENUS

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Heavily compressed looking static menus with set-up options to choose audio tracks, subtitles, select episodes, or simply play all of them back-to-back. Disc two has an extra menu for the special features.

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AUDIO

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An English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track at 448 KB/s and a French stereo surround dub at 192 KB/s are on all episodes. Yes, despite compression, the surround sound track is full bit-rate.

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VIDEO

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Unlike the main series, the quality is rather poor here. A relatively low bitrate encode leaves the episodes looking splotchy, full of MPEG noise, macro blocking, and color banding. It also appears the episodes have been blurred and edge enhanced added after downscaling.

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EXTRAS

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A 21x9 version of the pilot episode is included, which is an interesting and unique special feature that I've never seen anyone do before. It's a lot better than the black & white version of the pilot on the main series season one special edition. (I mean did we really need a completely re-encoded version of that episode in B&W, when we can just turn down our monitors saturation?!)

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FINAL THOUGHTS

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Honestly, the quality is quite bad. A modern show like this should NOT be compressed this much! At least they kept the surround sound at full bitrate, and even managed to fit a French dub...but at what cost? (The video, in part!) I'm not sure if this issue continues on with the later seasons or not, as I don't have them.

 

I'm unsure of the quality of the standard edition. The episodes alone would probably look fine on DVD-5's, but they tacked on all the extras to disc two instead of putting them on a third disc or using dual layer discs. I'd skip the DVDs and get the Blu-Rays instead.

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TECH. SPECS.
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                                                                  ASPECT RATIO: 1.78:1 (Original Widescreen)
                                                            NUMBER OF DISCS: 2
                                                                        DISC SIZE: Single-Layer (4.38 Gb)
                                                                  REGION CODE: 1 / NTSC

                                                                            AUDIO: English 5.1 (448 KB/s)

                                                                                      French 2.0 Surround (192 KB/s)
                                                                      SUBTITLES: English, French
                                                                       RUN-TIME: 4 Hours 51 Minutes