Buena Vista Home Entertainment (Disney) is rapidly proving itself as one of the companies that get it when it comes to releasing top quality Blu-ray Discs. The company is releasing consistently high quality BDs by employing both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/AVC compression for its 1080p video transfers and using uncompressed PCM soundtracks. The extras are relatively thin, but that's easy enough to forgive when the principal mission of providing high quality picture and sound is met.

But Buena Vista also gets that the folks who are shelling out for Blu-ray players and discs right now are enthusiasts who want to show off their new shiny Blu-ray players and discs to friends and relatives. To make that a snap, BVHE has a feature on every Blu-ray Disc called "Movie Showcase" that has three scenes chosen to "showcase the ultimate in high-definition picture and sound." The scenes can be played individually or all three in a row. That's pretty cool.

Among the BVHE Blu-ray releases I've seen, the standouts in picture and sound quality include Eight Below, which is a gripping story about a dog sled team left to fend for itself in Antarctica. Take my recommendation of this movie with the proverbial grain. It's admittedly a bit saccharine, and I"m a dog guy and a sucker for this kind of thing. Flightplan is a mostly clever thriller with solid image quality and a very involving, creative sound design that enhances the on-screen action brilliantly. The Brothers Grimm is a failure as a movie, even for this devout Terry Gilliam fan. Although the AVC-encoded transfer is spotty wiith some darker scenes showing poor contrast and noise, there are many eye-popping sequences, including two of the three Movie Showcase scenes. The Wild is an animated film that's not up to Diney's quality standards narratively, but features the kind of mind-bending video quality that the all-digital chain of today's computer animation consistently provides. Just in is the razzle-dazzle of Chicago. I don't like musicals a whole lot, but I've watched the Movie Showcase clips and they look and sound fantastic. I'll do my best to get through this movie again to provide a full review on UAV.

BVHE's already consistent quality on BD means we can look forward to some spectacular images from its big releases later in the year, which include both Pirates of the Caribbean movies and Pixar's Cars.