This DVD can be split into two parts "The Best Is Yet To Come" which is a lengthy but complete documentary on Luciano Pavarotti's life and influences. I'm not going to introduce the fat boy, you've seen him ad nauseum in the Three Amigos act... well with Domingo and Carreras.

This documentary is done in a very Italian style with an English voiceover and the original Italian track silenced. On the continent, that is fairly regular however in the English speaking world we usually get a low volume Italian track and the English voiceover placed on top. As to the content, it is exhaustive so I'd expect that even fans will learn something.

'The Event' is the music presentation and it's excerpts from operas and other pieces. Each runs maybe three to five minutes and you may get Pavarotti singing or a montage of shots from the opera or scenes that are influenced by the song (ie. pictures of Florence etc.)

The extras are a short music presentation of Nessum Dorma sung at the 1990 Soccer World Cup. There is a short text biography.

All pieces have a little 'I' for information in the corner and you get a short text piece on each music excerpt.

You can either choose to play the interview or the music or 'play all' which interveaves the documentary with the music turn by turn. Inventive however a bit useless.

The music however will only play each excerpt and then bounce back to the menu. There is no way the play the music from end to finish. The interview plays the same way.

I was expecting that you can play the lot at once and skip chapters if you dislike that particular piece or just play the whole musical piece for an hour or so of uninterrupted music. That perhaps is too logical. Instead you wear out your remote and patience.

Video is 16:9 1.85:1 and of generally acceptable to mediocre in quality.

The interview is reasonable with decent TV style quality. There isn't much here that stresses the compression, all the faults are from the original program.

The video quality of the music presentation is appreciably worse with some very poor source material and glaringly bad compression resulting in heavy ringing and artifacts. Colours and visuals are poor.

The quality if the music presentation is something else.

The audio is either 448k/s Dolby 5.1 or 192k/s stereo. Both are undistinguished. The 5.1 track has limited surrounds, mostly to bolster the fronts. Both tracks are limited bandwidth with poor body and a flat, hollow sound. The big Pav has a chesty, full voice and there's nothing here to reinforce that.

Given the medicore sound and video and the strange presentation I cannot recommend this even to fans as it will drive you batty. There are three versions of Nessum Dorma here to sweeten the pot as it were... that's how bad it is.