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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?"
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.
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.
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
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.