Brent Reid
Supporting Actor
Inspired by the proliferation of threads here and elsewhere concerning pirate and bootleg Blu-rays and DVDs, I’ve written a comprehensive article on the subject:
Here's an extracted checklist from the article, on identifying the rip-offs:
The article particularly focuses on European pirates and it includes a list of the most prolific offenders. I'd welcome any further info or labels that can be added to the list. I'll keep both my article and this post updated.
Hopefully this will enable buyers to make an informed choice. Supporters and apologists for pirated releases can let their consciences guide them accordingly.
Here's an extracted checklist from the article, on identifying the rip-offs:
- There are no proper studio or copyright credits or logos anywhere on the discs or sleeves. Comparing them to a release from another country will give an indication of what they should show.
- Pirate companies generally have a lack of any credible internet presence, with no websites (or cheap-looking, barely functional ones), social media accounts or online stores. They are, for all intents and purposes, incommunicado.
- Outside of their native countries, pirated discs are shifted chiefly via online stores like Amazon and eBay – both of which do virtually nothing to stop them.
- Many titles are from studios not normally known for licensing to other labels or at the very least, have never previously appeared on another label.
- European pirates in particular are often issued on recordable BD-Rs or DVD-Rs, as opposed to proper, factory-pressed discs.
- Audio and video on a single disc can be ripped from multiple sources, but pirate companies never release anything hitherto commercially unavailable.
- Pirate copies very rarely contain any extras but when they do, again they’re never anything unique or commercially unavailable.
- When a pirate Blu-ray is released of a film that cannot be bought physically in HD, its source will usually be an upscaled DVD, with zero improvement in quality. Occasionally, alternative sources may be a HD TV broadcast or a rip from a legitimate online streaming service, such as Netflix or Amazon Instant Video.
- Pirate discs are almost always single-layered, compressing the original files to a lower quality, and Blu-rays usually have lossy, space-saving Dolby Digital audio. The official releases they’re copied from will often be dual-layered and almost invariably have lossless, full quality PCM, DTS-HD MA or Dolby TrueHD soundtracks.
- Pirates never have any region coding and DVDs are usually in the NTSC format, which is playable anywhere. This enables them to be pushed to the broadest market possible.
The article particularly focuses on European pirates and it includes a list of the most prolific offenders. I'd welcome any further info or labels that can be added to the list. I'll keep both my article and this post updated.
Hopefully this will enable buyers to make an informed choice. Supporters and apologists for pirated releases can let their consciences guide them accordingly.
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