I have several DVDs of more than 82 minutes which are single layer. I don't know how long 'Return of the Jedi' is, I've never seen the film, apart from the few minutes which I watched on this disk. I only have a small television, but I would say that the quality was similar to laserdisc, and certainly better than VHS. My player can display the bit rate, but I didn't look to see what it was on this disk. I have just checked a few of my DVDs, and the bit rate seems to be typically about 6 or 7. These are all commercial releases, I have no exprerience of doing MPEG 2 encoding or DVD authoring myself.

"If it was a pressed disc from a glass master rather than a DVD-R then these pirates must have made serious numbers of copies. There can't be that many DVD pressing plants in existence - surely Mr. Valenti's FBI friends would be able to identify the facility which manufactured it from evidence on the disc, and then pursue the matter through (international, if necessary) law."

This was a pressed disk, and that's just the point I was making; a DVD pressing plant is not exactly something which somebody could set up in their bedroom. This is clearly large-scale commercial piracy, and I cannot understand how it happens. I couldn't walk into a any DVD production company in this country, and have them run off a few thousand copies of a major feature film for me. What happens in the Far East, are the pirates operating on such a large scale that they can set up their own production plants, or do the 'legitimate' plants not care, and are happy to do work for the pirates?

Also, how can organisations openly advertise the sale of what are clearly pirate disks, on the internet. Surely it cannot be too difficult to put a stop to this sort of thing, at least the distribution in this country, if not the production overseas.

One thing to look for is these discs are almost always region 0 (zero). Another thing is the copyright notice will generally have a poor english translation - sometimes with spelling errors.

Now why these make it through customs I have no idea. Some vendors that sell them even claim they aren't bootlegs.

Steven Gorsky

This is because we kept complaining & his auctions were being cancelled.
We started to forward these onto the MPANZ but to little effect.
Now between the DVD user group we simply bid for these & do not complete the sale.

During the question and answer period with Kevin Smith, someone asked how he felt about his film being readily available for sale downstairs before its release. He said that he wasn't worried about them hurting sales and whatnot, and that he even wouldn't mind autographing one of the bootleg copies if someone wanted. He ended by saying, "...the film made millions of dollars, so it doesn't really bother me that someone wants to make a few bucks on the side." He actually found it flattering that fans liked the film that much.

Then you have someone like Lucas, when his low-definition mess of a movie was available in a choppy, 8-fps AVI file with the sound cutting out every 5 minutes a week before release, screaming and shouting that he will lose "Millions of Dollars" in opening weekend ticket sales.

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