Film:
Jack Bauer (Sutherland) is an agent at the anti-terrorist unit CTU. A little after a fight between his wife and daughter he gets a phone call that he immediately needs to come in as there's word that an assasination attempt is going to be done on the black presidential candidate David Palmer.
While he's on his way to CTU, his daughter leaves the house to go to a party with her girlfriend without informing her parents.
When his investigation begins, he soon finds out that the conspiracy reaches to even within his own unit and that there's nobody he can trust.
Meanwhile, his daughter gets kidnapped and he know's he's in for the hardest day of his life...
 
Geluid en Beeld:
The image quality is reasonable for a TV show but does display quite a lot of edge enhancement and grain and lacks shadow detail. Also some compression errors appear from time to time, but for the rest we can't complain.
One thing that does bother me is that it looks like the series has been completely put on dvd as they've been shown which means that each episode also contains a flashback where you get to see the highlights of the previous episode. Rather annoying if you want to check out all episodes one after another, especially since you can't skip this part without manually doing a fast forward...

For the sound we can say about the same. There's no 5.1 track but the 2.0 sound is decent although in certain scenes you can hear the dialogues jumping to the rear channel instead of staying at the front.
 
Extra's:
We get only two extra's on the last disc, starting off with an alternate ending which lasts about 2 minutes and is REALLY alternate.
Next up is a "Preview on Season 2" but rather shows Sutherland who gives a short rundown of what were the highlights of season 1 and tell us that Season 2 will be even better.
 
Conclusie:
"24" is real-time. Although, that's what people make you believe. Each episode covers an hour, but in effect only is about 40 minutes long. Commercial blocks still reign in the US :(

Still, this series is great to watch and is exciting from beginning to the end.

Too bad the extra's are worth hardly anything.