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Psst! Eight Bits Gets You "The Two Towers" In China
rocodipoco writes "CNN reports on this article about DVDs of "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" were available in Shanghai two weeks ago for about $1 a pop, according to one Western film industry executive who visited that city. The film opens in North America on December 18. Interviewed at the CineAsia movie convention, the executive said as many as 40 street vendors were openly offering DVDs outside a Shanghai mall; he declined their offers, and thus can't verify the quality of the counterfeit copies. I personally want to wait for the movie to hit the big screen...it's all about the suspense. What do others think?"
For me Usenet is one of the most reliable sources for this kind of news. If it hasn't been posted on newsgroups, it is most certainly not available.
There is a very good search engine available: http://alt.binaries.nl
If you can't find it there, it's not posted/available.
Daxy's Networking Blog
I've seen a few copies of LoTR 2 here in China. Sort of. All the DVD/VCD copies I've seen here so far have been labelled quite well. Pretty box art and everything. But when you put in the disc it turns out to be a completely different movie. Not sure which movie it was as I didn't watch long enough to be sure, but it's some old fantasy flick from the 70's. AFAIK they don't have a real copy of LoTR 2 yet in China.
Do not anger the worm.
yeah, if you like porn, you can have the "Two Towers.dvdrip.(REAL!!!).avi" or a hundred variants of the same crap. I've tried 'em all, haven't found the real thing yet. However, Two Towers.avi" was pretty good, because I've been looking for Ghost Dog for quite some time. If only it wasn't such a terrible low-res rip.
If the REAL DEAL was out there, I'd have it already for sure - you can't hide something that big for sooo long. Fucking liar movie guy. Hong Kong doesn't have it, Chinatown here doesn't have it.. plain fact: it ain't there.
Hmmmm - I think this is the original home of this link. The petition was authored by one Kevin Klerck. Wait a minute! Slashdotwidener@yahoo.com? It's the Goatse.cx troll!
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Having traveled in Asia a couple of times, I know from experience that this does indeed happen. Street vendors in cities like Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur are selling lots of pirated CD's and DVD's. It's quite funny to see them running when the police show up. Many guesthouses and restaurants show movies too. I have seen movies in Asia that hadn't started showing in the theaters in Europe when I came back home.
you gotta know which kind of rips to download. always download the divx encoded DVD rip of movies; those have the best quality, and are sometimes indistinguishable from the original DVD itself. there are some divx-encoded DVD rips that are split into two 600-700 meg files, and the quality is akin to a 256kbit/sec mp3. when i say indistinguishable, i mean it. you can play the oringinal DVD side by side with it, and you -cannot- tell the difference at all.
never download those SVCD rips or divx encoded VCD rips. you can usually tell because the former are in mpeg format, and the latter are usually only a few hundred megs, as compared to about 700 megs for a DVD ripped divx movie.
in my experience, the rips with the best quality are those from sharereactor.
In the scene of pirating movies everything is a prestige thing. Its about releasing the best quality movies before another group does it. The scene even has rules, though not as strict as the game-pirating scene. Anyway any group releasing this movie this early would get mucho kudoos or whatever those punks think they can measure their success as a pirate group with.
Any of the most succesfull groups have loads of contacts in Asia as things just are easier to get in asia, with more cinema-owners not caring about "lending" the screener-dvd to somebody for a night, and with all the anime or whatever kind of movies that are released there before the US. The dvd-rip would most probably hit the internet even before the streetvendors have it. so since there are no dvdrips on the internet there very probably is no dvd for sale in asia... so this is instead just that lil bit more attention and part of the media hyping of the movie...
PjotrP
I've found more than a dozen films on DVD in China, for less than US$2.00 each in the last 9 months, that were available before the movie on screen and/or on DVD.
:) ...oh, and these are most always region free
Sometimes the quality is of a handheld DV camera...sometimes the subtitles are from another movie. Sometimes they are tagged as pre-release evals. They are always at least worth the $2.00.
The prices are higher in Beijing...Tianjin is best for price. They are off-street in Bejing. Not at all hard to find in Tianjin...try any of the music stores near the colleges.
Seems to me the studios should hook up with these guys and find a way so that the consumer can get releases sooner and for a better price
I don't know where you've been, its around on IRC.
Try #divx-movies
Having lived in Beijing, I have no problem believing this. Two reasons.
1) He got the price right. The normal price for dvd/vcd from street vendors is 8-12 yuan. This is about $1.
2) I saw it happen. Not with this movie (I was there summer of 2001) but with others.
I don't know for a fact that this is true with the Two Towers, but it's not that hard to believe.
Why did they choose an actor looking 25, when Aragorn should look be at the very last years of his youth ?
Viggo Mortensen turned 43 during the filming. The actor initially cast as Aragorn was fired precisely for looking too young.
And New Line interference aside ("Make sure Bill the pony survives!") "Hollywood" had nothing to do with that film.
Er, if it's SVCD it's 480 x 576 PAL or 480 x 480 NTSC. Otherwise it's not an SVCD, it's just a random MPEG-2 stream burnt with the SVCD format.
A good SVCD will blow up just fine, especially on a TV.
Don't mistake TeleSync VCD's for DVDrip SVCD's. Just like there's plenty of crappy, low resolution, poorly encoded DivX's, the same can be said for SVCD.
I was in Beijing before The 1st lord of the rings came out and got hold of a copt of the 1st film on DVD, It was very poor copy and the sound was awfull, however it was the original. It cost the about 60 uk pence (about $1). You used to be able to get the pirate DVD's in shops but now they cut down on this becuase China wants to be in the WTO so the best thing to do is to go into some coffee shops and wait to be offered. There are some shops that seem to have the whole purpose of selling these DVD's. I bought about 60 when I was there and About a third were unwatchable. Also the english writing on the back is hilariously badly translated.
My friend recently came back from a visit to China where she bought one of those pirated Two Towers-DVD:s. Upon placing it in her DVD-player she discovered it was actually LOTR 1. The cover was an authentic-looking Two Towers one, however.
The company I work for has offices in Shanghai and people who travel there bring back pirated DVDs. It is not unusual that the label on the case says something different than what is actually in it. (You won't know it's the Sound of Music instead of LOTR until the seller is long gone)
:)
Since the exec did not buy it, we'll never know.
Now, I need to find out who's going over there next...
I expect LOTR:TTT will be an excellent film on large or small screens, but a theatre-sized screen and surround sound will add to the experience. The movie was filmed with a proper theatre in mind--moving to another venue and a lossier format will cost you some of the nuance.
~Idarubicin
Not IME; I was able to get VCDs or DVDs of big-name films like A.I. or AOTC months before they came out in the cinema, just by wandering down to the night market in a random tourist spot in Malaysia. There were traders there who would sell CDs by the shedload for about 1 USD each, and DVDs for a little bit more. Every so often, the police would raid them and confiscate stock, but they'd be back a few days later as if nothing happened.
While there were lots and lots of these CD stalls, they all had identical stock -- exactly the same movies, albums, and software, exactly the same comedy Engrish on the photoshopped covers. It looked like they were getting their stuff from large-scale dealers, rather than a couple of college student h4x0rs with a CD writer in their dorm.
Some of the DVDs were very good quality; others were rather grainy and subtitled; others were really awful, and looked like someone had smuggled a video camera into a test screening. You get what you pay for...
I'd noticed similar stalls in Shanghai, although maybe not on the same scale.
I found "Star Wars 2002" (actually dune), "Toy Story 3" (knick knack), and "Home Alone 13" (don't remember) in Malaysia.
Yep, these pirates are good. Be afraid Hollywood!
Right,
let me clear this up right here and now. I have lived in asia for the past 17 years of my life (though not in China)
YES, LoTR part 2 is available where I live...2 months before the release date.
And YES, Harry Potter 1 and 2 were both available months before their respective release dates, both on DVD.
Those are both facts.
Now let's get into the discussion...
Just because it comes on a DVD DOES NOT MEAN that it is DVD quality. When I go shopping for my $3 pirate DVDs, they come in 2 types at the local shops - type 5 and type 9 (referring, I think, to the number of gigabytes on each).
Now, everyone out here knows that the 9's are full DVD quality videos, and as such are only found after the original, FULL DVD has been properly and legally released. This still meant that I got to see Spiderman in DVD quality on a DVD 9 before it was released in the cinemas in the UK, because it was available as a promo DVD or whatever from the studios in the US shortly after the cinema release over there.
Now, DVD 5's are a different beast entirely. These are the DVDs that all these 'super early releases' are found on. And let me tell you - YES they are the full movie. NO, they are not worth watching. They are not even worth the $2 you can get them for at the market.
They are what we call 'cinema specials' - i.e. someone has smuggled an ultra-small handicam into a studio preview of the full movie. They are often someone unimportant, and therefore sit at the very edge of the screen, often way down in the front. So, the movies they record are at a skewed angle at best; the sound is in bad, peaking mono; and you can hear people talking all around you, often louder than the shit quality of the film sound they're recording.
At the end of a 'cinema special', you can watch the people from the rows in front of the person with the camera stand up to leave, and sometimes hear something from one of the studio people about how this is an early release copy and may not be the same as the one released to the cinemas in 2 months time.
So NO they are not lying when they say these early versions exist. NO they are not worth watching. They ruin your enjoyment of the proper film, presented in fullscreen glory, with proper sound and picture quality.
I can't believe some sheltered american who jumped to the conclusion 'I can't find it at wal-mart, so it mustn't exist and the studio must be lying' got moderated +5, insightful.
-Nano.