The old film peddler.
Dvds are a great thing. You get super-crisp video and audio quality, multiple languages, comments, extras and whatnot. The problem is that currently, those dvds come out months after the movie in question was in the cinema or on TV, and they tend to be on the more expensive side. Due to the hard work of several video ripping groups, most of the movies are available on the internet a week before they hit the silver screen, but not everyone has the knowledge and/or bandwidth to get them. This is where the bootleggers come in. They burn those movies to blanks, put them in a box with a photocopied cover and sell them for a fragment of the regular price.
Some time ago, Sean, the Metroblog LA captain, together with Xeni Jardin and Jeff Koga, went to downtown LA to check out those bootleggers, and their findings were.. well, mediocre, to say the least. You can get every current movie and then some for a few dollars, but they lack in quality, style, and they’re illegal. Still, for some people, it’s an incredibly nifty thing - spend less than a movie ticket to check out in the privacy of your own home if a movie is really worth the time and money to see and/or buy.
Today, I went shopping with a good friend, and after some bartering and work, we decided to let the day end with some nice food, so we went to a restaurant near Mariahilferstraße. After a few minutes of eating and talking, an old man with a small trolley, a few dvds in his hand. He approached one table after another, offering bootlegs of all current cinema movies for 5€ a piece. Now, mostly everyone knows that you can buy those underhand at Naschmarkt and other places, but a travelling salesman, that was something new. My friend decided to buy “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” from him. The guy went on to sell a few more films, and left, waving at us as he exited the restaurant.
We went outside with our findings (The light inside wasn’t that photo-compatible), and after a few seconds of awe, we decided to test the thing. As expected, he sold my friend a VCD, not a DVD, and even though it was clear that the movie was filmed with a DV-cam at a cinema, the overall quality was good - they even included the English and French sound tracks besides the German one. The CD had a few scratches, but nothing problematic. The only problem was that we could start the film only right in the middle of it, but that might have been related to software problems.
In conclusion, those bootlegs are cheap, and they are available a long time before the legit dvds come out, but the quality can vary a lot, from decent to absolutely unbearable and broken. Oh, yeah, and course buying them illegal, so please do not try it at home, kids! Remember, pirating movies makes baby MPAA cry. Or something like that. Who knows.
Saw this guy last friday. Kinda weird.
“…”spend less than a movie ticket to check out in the privacy of your own home if a movie is really worth the time and money to see and/or buy.”
That means you buy and watch a movie to check out if it is worth buying / watching. Really want to be on the safe side, huh?
no software problems, the movie just isn’t fully on there ;) also no french or english ;) only a bad german version
Crackerjack: The thing is, with the ripped version, if I realize the movie isn’t something i want to see, I simply stop it, and either give it to someone who might enjoy it or throw it away. I’d have a hard time doing that in a cinema, and walking out would annoy all the people who actually want to see it.
Anon: Ah damn - well, good to know. :)
which movie?
the gap between theatrical and DVD release is narrowing, approaching 6 months, whereas it takes a film more like 2 or 3 years to get on TV (so “dvds come out months after the movie in question was on TV” would be wrong) — where’s the problem there?
another thing i don’t understand is why you find EUR 5 for a bootleg to be “cheap”. for a decent DVD rip or copy from a store with a selection comparable to a store that sells legit DVDs, it would be cheap. but if you want crap you’ll throw away after watching the film once: get a cinema ticket — on mondays (or, depending on the cinema in question, maybe tuesdays, wednesdays, or all of the above) they’re only EUR 5 to EUR 6, the quality is good, and you can also choose between german and original version. a VCD, on the other hand, offers no big screen, no 5.1 surround sound, and no comfy seat in an air-conditioned theatre, so paying pretty much the same price isn’t cheap, no way.
you shouldn’t play down the criminal intent aspect of the story. now i’m all for sharing your digital data with your cybernetically extended circle of friends and freeing it from Digital Restrictions Madness, especially when it’s about a movie you wouldn’t have ever paid money for anyways. but if you’re going to spend money anyways, giving it to parasites is quite idiotic. (except if you’re obtaining a sample for the sake of journalism of course.)
or maybe i’m over-reacting because the large number of computer illiterates who can’t burn their own copy makes me mad? after all, buying a bootleg isn’t as bad as buying a legit copy that fell off a truck.
as to the ’software problem’: as VCDs don’t compress as well as well made DivXs, it’s common to use two discs. looks like you got yourselves one half of a 2 CD set.
I don’t say the whole DVD bootlegging is a good thing - but 5 bucks for a movie I can watch at home is cheaper than 15/20/25/… euros. and I personally prefer to see them on my laptop instead of the big screen.
as for the tv thing, that was badly phrased by my side - i was talking about made-for-tv movies, not cinema movies that appear on TV later on.
and, all in all, the whole thing somehow feels good to my cyberpunkish gibsonesque bladerunning alter ego.
yup, that’s what i assumed — made-for-TV movies. but do those come out on DVD?
5 bucks for a proper rip would be much better than 20 bucks for sure, but it’s too much for a crappy VCD; especially if half of the film is missing. but of course i’m also thinking about who gets the money (e.g. i never watch disney or disney-pixar films at the cinema), and it bothers me when it lands in the pocket of someone who does this business because he finds it slightly less cumbersome (and also more profitable) than printing his own EUR 5 notes on his inkjet.
to my cyberpunkish gibsonesque netrunning ego, it would feel good to get an oscar committee screener copy from an insider you only know through a strongly encrypted, steganographically hidden virtual channel, encode it using optimal coder settings for each individual scene, and pass it on through a super-secret darknet to a group of insiders who arrange for the file to trickle into the p2p nets from dozens of connections at once. for the hack value of it. for the sake of preserving movies in an open format. (as opposed to obsolete DRMd DVDs.) in order to fight The System.
but doing it to Make Money Fast … in meatspace … that’s neither cyber, nor punk. it could still be gibsonesque, iff it was about obscure arthouse films that are impossible to get for an affordable price through official channels. or if the files themselves were illegal in one way or another. or … at the very least, you should get what you’re paying for. parts of the movie missing, that’s inacceptable.