Asian DVD's is the box the only difference? (1 Viewer)

Looking on the bay for 24 season 2. Most of these Asian auctions state that they are region code free and they are not bootlegs, but may not have english boxes. My question is, if you only care about the Sound and picture quality, are they identical to US store bought discs with Dolby digital sound and all the other goodies,and just not english boxes, etc?
Thanks in advance,
Gerry

No, they are usually far from the same. Crappy picture and sound are generally found due to being compressed to get more on a disc. And most of the "Asian Import" versions of American TV shows are bootlegs, regardless of what they may say in the auction.

Agree entirely with what Jeremy says. What happens is that the copyright laws in Asia are far laxer than in the US/UK so you get small companies "legitimately" releasing DVDs. They're not technically bootleg as they're not breaking Asian law but they've not paid licence fees to the studios and in general had no access to masters to create the DVDs from so you get the extra compression Jeremy mentioned and often the DVD will just have been created from an off-air transmission or just copied from legitimate R1/R2 releases.

I personally never touch R3 releases.

The only chance I have taken on an Asian bootleg was a waste of money. Certainly the official foreign country releases can be very good, but the bootlegs are likely awful.

Chris

If you buy an official Asian R3 DVD from a reputable supplier (someone like CD-Wow or Yesasia) they are the genuine DVD and for the major Hollywood films from studios like Fox, Warner, Universal they are the same content wise as the R1 releases just cheaper. Just beware of local censorship laws as this may affect some titles. With Fox you get the bonus that many of the 2 disk SE get released upfront in R3 like R2 so they don't do they double dip they have been favouring in R1. They only mild niggle is packaging can be poor with very cheap and nasty keepcases used (they also do some very nice digipak releases though).

As others have said is I would never buy an Asian release from ebay you are almost 100% certain to get a bootleg despite what the listing says. Especially if it says R0 for a major release, as these will always be R3 encoded on the official Asian release.

While I agree there are a lot of bootlegs and questionable discs out there in R3 land, I wouldn't write them off completely. You just have to do your homework and as was suggested earlier buy from a reputable site. There are many examples where the R3 version is superior to the R1 version, and not just for Asian films.

Off hand, the R3 versions of Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow and Army Of Darkness are both drastic improvements over their R1 counterparts both in terms of audio and video quality (Sky Captain moved the extras over to a separate second disc, so the AV bitrates are boosted on the film itself; Army is the director's cut with complete film elements used, not workprint videotape as in the R1 version).