"Pirated" DVD's??

[Lord Sandwich]

First time I've seen them here in the Philippines, and they certainly weren't around last month! At the rate they're flooding the flea markets, fake VCD's will be non-existent in less than six months.

Anyway, has anyone gotten a hold of a real pirated DVD? All the titles I checked out looked as though they were made from analog sources, which technically wouldn't make them a pirated DVD.

It strikes me as very odd that Asian bootleggers might never have heard of DeCSS. :)

[ppera2]

There is a lot of Chinese pirate DVD's recorded in theatre with camera. Mostly newest movies. No original DVD, no DECSS.

[MaTTeR]

I've purchased a few from China, assuming they were legit. DVD's arrived and you could clearly tell the cover of the package was printed on some home inkjet printer:) The DVD itself played fine but some of the menu's did behave strangely and skipping chapters would result in a lockup. Needless to say I won't be buying any DVD titles from China anymore:)

EDIT- Oh, the picture quality was excellent, It definitely wasn't the theater camera crap we see all over the net.

[theReal]

I've recdntly seen a DVD rip (2 CD's, very good SBC rip!) from an obviously bootlegged Tomb Raider DVD. It seemed to be copied from analog film, not with a camera but with much more professional equipment. It looked like analog film, but nevertheless the quality was very high. Oh, and it had hardcoded Chinese (?) subtitles...

[Lord Sandwich]

Nothing I saw in the stalls was camcorder-based at all. If they weren't made from LD sources, then I suppose they were rips after all. Shrek looked fantastic for a bootleg, and I'm 99% sure it was a DVD rip--except that no one seemed to want to show the actual movie, just a particular special feature. Very suspicious. :)

And LOTR was definitely of high quality, with word on the street being that someone was able to leak out a promotional copy of the DVD?!?

I bought a copy of T2:Judgment Day, and an interesting thing they did was to squeeze the picture into its correct aspect ratio (2:35:1 for T2) to improve compressibility. Given that it has an average bitrate of only 3.5 kbps, that a pretty good technique. :)

[Bugs Bunny]

Movie pirates move with the times just like anybody else. The news of DVD players overtaking VCRs in last Christmas' sales is a call-to-arms for everybody and his sister to start cranking out DVD copies, both the legit and the illegit. I agree that the VCDs and the SVCDs aren't much longer for this world.

[smiller667]

I saw a few pirated DVDs from China at a friend's place. The titles were available on legit DVDs as well, so apparently there was no reason for a cam/screener job. All DVDs were single-layer and featured the original menus. They were definitely using a DVD as source. Not all menu items were functional, all the extras were removed and most subtitle options were greyed out as well.
I did not get a chance to look at the bitrates, but I guess they might have reencoded the movies with a lower bitrate.
Covers were printed rather professionally, although with lots of spelling errors ... the cases were a bit crappy (low quality plastic).

@bugs: I guess you meant "overtook VCD" sales? VCRs were never a big thing in mainland China, whereas VCD really was and still is.

[Lord Sandwich]

That's the thing, though. There's an overwhelming number of fake titles that were apparently mastered from LD. These people actually took the time out to capture single-layer movies with an analog TV card and VBR encode them, when the same movie is already available as an original DVD!

I guess this is a good thing for now, since widespread DVD ripping in China is bad news for all of us. But it's only a matter of time before they figure it out. :(

[gooki]

Try and hunt down the dvd thunderbolt, which was created by 'funny'. It's prety easy to tell which one you are buying as it has hologram sticker on it which say's 'funny'. It's definetly been sourced from laser disc and highly unlikly to be origional. Additionally it's been around for 4+ months.

[smiller667]

As for the Thunderbolt DVD by Funny, you might want to know that Funny is a perfectly legit company from Taiwan ... head over to http://asiandvdguide.com for some screenshots of the DVD. This of course doesn't exclude the possibility of a pirate DVD put out with a faked Funny logo.

[mrdish2000]

One of my friends brought more than 20 DVDs from Malaysia (4 months ago). It is not easy to distinguesh them from normal DVD boxes.
After playing them I found that:
- Some DVDs have no menus.
- Some DVDs have permanent chinese and english subtitles. (eg. TombRider).
- All DVDs have english subtitles.
- the video quality was good except one DVD, which has VCD qulity.
- Some DVDs were not relased yet at that time. (eg. American Pie2).

My frined told me that the price is 5 Ringgits (less than 1.5$) per DVD.