As befits the BBC's reputation for producing some of the world's best nature documentaries, the five-disc set Planet Earth is an epic travelogue, focussing on different ecologies and the unique animals that inhabit them.
Once again, Sir David Attenborough provides the narration, as the cameras fly across the surface of the earth, zooming in to give us a bug's eye view one minute, zooming out to give us an eagle's perspective the next.
The BBC's cameramen filmed more than 200 locations, resulting in some truly spectacular footage, much of which has never before been seen--such as the rare sight of an endangered snow leopard hunting in the Himalayas, or great white sharks leaping from the water as they hunt.
The creators of Planet Earth endured some of the world's most hostile environments, from the deepest ocean depths to an Antarctic blizzard to a fetid, cockroach- and bat-infested cave, just to grab a few moments of film...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0795176/
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Codec: x264
Bitrate: ~11-12 Mbit/s (peaks at ~40Mbit)
Resolution: 1920x1080
Framerate: 23.976fps
Length: ~50-53 mins
Audio:
Codec: AC3
Bitrate: 448 kbit/s
Channels: 5.1
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List of contents:
Episode 1: From Pole to Pole
"Planet Earth" travels around the Earth, finding where the sun always shines and where it's rarely seen. Next, they find where water is abundant and where it's scarce.
Episode 2: Mountains
Mountains are the most prominent products of the immense forces which shape the living planet: tectonic drift, volcanic activity and erosion by wind, water, frost and precipitation...
Episode 3: Fresh Water
Although merely 3% of water on earth, fresh water plays an important part in the planet's weather and erosion. It is immensely important for all non-marine wildlife, which drinks fresh water and swims, procreates, hunts in it...
Episode 4: Caves
The Earth's large, deep calcareous caves are virtually inaccessible and therefore barely explored - requiring expert diving where flooded. Some of its wildlife is as strange and specific as in the deep, darkest part of the ocean, whether physically adapted -notably to the dark...
Episode 5: Deserts
A large and growing part of earth's land mass is covered in desert - each one widely varied in composition and dryness. Wildlife species have adapted in different ways to these different arid lands especially to get and conserve water...
Episode 6: Ice Worlds
The polar caps have the most extreme seasonal contrasts, growing and melting vast ice masses, so wildlife adapts by annual migrations. The majority of Antartica is a vast barren permafrost. Only 3% of the coast and peninsular peaks are where life migrates to in the spring, for a short fertile summer, attracted by rich supplies of krill and fish...
Episode 7: Great Plains
A quarter of the earth's land mass, from arctic to tropical, are open plains consisting of lowland as well as highland plateaus.
Episode 8: Jungles
On 3% of the Earth's surface, the rain forest is the habitat for half our animal species, even 80% of insects. So its wildlife is most competitive, like the birds of paradise's mating, and specialized with unique relationships of predation, parasitism etc...
Episode 9: Shallow Seas
Shallow seas cover only 8% of earth's surface, but contain the richest, most varied maritime life: from plankton and coral (literally vital for the very existence of reefs) to birds and from various invertebrates to mammals like seals, dolphins and whales and from sea snakes to countless fish species...
Episode 10: Seasonal Forests
Trees are earth's largest organisms and are also one of the planet's oldest inhabitants. Seasonal forests (unlike tropical rain-forest) the largest land habitats. A third of all trees grow in the endless taiga of the Arctic north...
Episode 11: Ocean Deep
Open ocean, a vast biotope covering two thirds of the planet, some shallow, some as deep as the mountain ranges are high. The ocean has an immense, precariously complex food chain, varying from microscopic animals, like krill, to whales, which ironically feed mainly on the former...
Very good series.