Pirated DVD

[msc]

Ignore about the legacy and morality issue. What is the bad impact of pirated DVD or CD to player?

I am from Asia region, pirated DVD is everywhere here, and 1 DVD9 only selling for USD1.8, you even will get 1 free with buying 5. this actually makes all the shop selling original dvd to close up. We can only buy the original DVD online with higher price.

I brought the original Kills Bill 1 &2 recently, and a friend of mine owns pirated. I cant tell the different, the sound or image quality when playing them using same player and HT system. Pirated comes with both DTS and DD sound format........

I am wordless. and you.... what will you do? will you buy the pirated? If you are well off and really a big fan and movie collector, i think you will buy the original. but the question is you can buy 20 or even more with the price for only 1 original. move by that?...

Anyone has the DTS demo 9? Worth to buy?

and who will wins for next generation of DVD? HD or blu-ray.......

 

[Audioholics]

It makes our DVDs cost more... and also makes the RIAA and MPAA mad so they sue people domestically since, of course, they have no interest in actually cracking down on international piracy. That would be too difficult and costly.

 

[claudermilk]

Why ignore the morality issue? That's the problem. Pirated DVDs (CD, etc...) is theft & buying them encourages the thieves. If that's all that gets bought, why would the studios produce any more? Actually you answered your own question: the shops selling legitimate copies closed. Need more be said?

I think the studios are trying to push for some ridiculous laws here, but they do have a right to profit from their work.

 

[brian32672]

Actually this thread probably belongs in movies/dvd's.
But heres my 2. I have a friend in Australia that gets pirated dvd's from China. And he has told me that the quality is no where near as good as an original from the states. I can only take his word for it. I have gotten a few imports of movies never released on dvd in America. And boy are they crappy quality. Stone Cold & Corvette Summer are 2 of about 10 I have. The do have Chinese menus, but are quite obvious vhs tranfers. Or very poor quality equipment, or combination of both.

I did get Swamp Thing from raredvds.com and it was superb. Great sound and picture. But sadly they don't have the others that are hard to find, at least not the ones I want. But I'm on their mailing list and will wait to see if any of these pop up...

 

[Audioholics]

I agree. It is wrong and people need to act more responsibly and take a longer view of the potential damage.

However, as the post states, there is a lot of illegal (and damaging) copying going on overseas - and that's where it really hurts the MPAA, etc.

Meanwhile back at the home front I wouldn't pay $20 for what's come out of Hollywood this year except for a small handful of titles. And Lucas isn't Hollywood, which makes the sum total "scant minus one." Not to steer the topic away from piracy, but while buying DVDs was a thing I was into when they first came out - all of a sudden I find myself renting them via Netflix, etc and only buying the ones I want as "souveniers". With awful plots, senseless skin (did you see merchant of Venice? Why the need for an R rating?) and general unoriginality, I am finding less and less I want in my collection.

All I'm opining is that overseas piracy is doing far more damage than domestic - yet domestic is where the RIAA/MPAA targets. Overseas - our movies look like manna from heaven (except for the new batch of excellent movies from China over the last couple years) and people gobble them up (apparently illegally). Domestically, I think we are not as impressed with Hollywood.

 

[Buckeyefan 1]

Not to mention how terrible most of the audio downloads are coming off the net. You can download movies via Bearshare, but it takes forever and loads up your hard drive. It's just too time consuming and the quality is so so. We have a Blockbuster down the street, and for $15 a month, can rent a movie a day every day of the month. Our local library also stocks a decent collection, and they are free.

An engineering friend of mine traveled to China on business last summer. He picked up 20 of those dvd's for $1 a piece. The quality is abysmal. It's night and day compared to the originals. Not one had the quality of an average VCR tape.

If I see a great older DVD with at least DTS surround sound for under $10, I'll pick it up. Otherwise, I'll rent it.

 

[SilverMK3]

A friend of mine recently came back from a trip to Thailand where he was suckered into buying about 30 pirated DVDs on the streets.

The quality of the end products varied drastically. A couple of them were exact copies of the original retail discs and were nearly indistinguishable from the originals aside from the obviously inkjet-printed label and purple dye on the bottom of the disc. These played fine on all of our players and looked great.

Others were obviously foreign-market releases that had Thai menus and stereo-only english tracks but played fine on my region 1 player.

Others still seemed like domestic releases but had no special features, audio options, or soundtrack choices. I think these were ripped from the originals using software like DVD-Shrink. When compared against my retail copies of these discs, there was a noticable decrease in bandwidth used by the audio and video. Where my original had a disc average bandwidth of ~8Mbps, the pirated discs averaged ~5-6Mbps. This is most likely because they were re-compressed when they were ripped, losing information along the way because MPEG-2 is a lossy format.

There were even a couple of discs that were obvious handheld camera bootlegs or half-resolution DivX compressed copies of the movies. These were nearly unwatchable, had no menus, and averaged below 2Mbps when tested.

As you can see, the biggest issue here is quality control. You have no idea what you're getting when you buy one of these discs until you pop it into your player. It may be just as good as the real thing, but chances are you'll be disappointed with what you get.

Now, I've never been a fan of the RIAA/MPAA, but I DO care about quality. I think we are better off with somebody regulating the quality of DVD releases.

Also, the MPAA is the lesser of the two evils, considering that I go to a store and see a $25 music CD and a $25 DVD movie, I know that there's more value behind the 3hr movie than the 1hr audio recording.

 

[furrycute]

I have long lost interest in mainstream Hollywood movies. The plot is just getting worse and worse by the year. I am more than happy to wait and watch them on HBO. There is no way I am paying $20 per title for most of the garbage that's been coming out of Hollywood these years.

 

[racquetman]

Maybe the novelty has worn off

I'm with Clint. I used to buy DVDs all the time back a couple years ago. I've ended up with a lot of movies that I wonder why I bought in the first place. I guess I just thought it was cool to have a lot of DVDs to show off. Since I joined Netflix I now watch all movies first before I consider buying them.

I think the novelty has worn off. DVD was impressive video and audio quality just a few years ago. Now HDTV puts it to shame in video quality, and 5.1 surround sound has been around long enough now that it no longer is "awe inspiring." There is nothing that "wows" me about DVD anymore. Now I need an actual quality movie to impress me instead of the presentation, and as we all know that doesn't happen very often in Hollywood these days.

Now I'm waiting for HD quality movies to hit the market so I can be wowed again.

 

[furrycute]

I was on a DVD buying spree a couple of years ago. I think at one time I accumulated over 300 DVDs. Since then I have sold off most of them, retaining only some documentaries, foreign films, and some anime series. I only have a couple of mainstream movies left in my collection (like Das Boot superbit).

 

[korgoth]

originals are much better quality, bootlegs are usually compressed very porly, even if the memory space is similar.

not always the case, sometimes its hardly noticeable, but generally its pretty obvious

 

[philh]

Neighbor gave me a copy of SW 3. I got through five minutes and couldn't stand the horrible sound and even worse picture. I thinks dad's old super 8 movies were better quality.

 

[Jimmy111]

I personally think there is nothing wrong with pirated DVD's. Genuine ones are just too expensive. The ones I get from ShenZhen in China are 50p each (weather a new or old release) and you cant tell the difference from the originals the picture quality and sound are the same. The newly released ones I can get from a store in London like HMV are about 14 pounds

 

[Rob Babcock]

To this day I've still never rented a DVD, and I don't think the average movie is really any worse than those of ten years ago. True, the novelty has worn off of DVD, and people for the most part aren't running like lemmings from one "demo disc" to another. But for me that was always a very minor part. I simply love movies. I think I love them even more than I love the gear I play them on! Therefore, since it's always been about the film itself, I buy as many as I ever did- some months more and some months less, depending upon release schedules and my personal finances. Lately gaming has edged DVDs with me, mostly due to a whirlwind romance with RPGs for the Xbox. But I always come back to movies.