So I was bit recently by buying bootleg DVD sets on
Ebay and Amazon (third party). With searching I
find that Shout Factory used to have a FAQ on it's
counterfeits, but they are derelict in not keeping
the FAQ on their website. My anger was at Shout
Factory and Sony because that's what I saw on the
package and there were no warnings about the fakes
on reviews on Amazon, as well as Sony's notorious
favoring of highly compressed Mill Creek engineering
for TV releases and has no problem with Mill Creek
being distributed by Amazon under the name "Sony",
aka the extremely processed Mill Creek Blu-Rays of
I Dream Of Jeannie. Mill Creek always use double
layered discs, and would ruin it by low bit-rate by not
using enough discs while the bootlegs are low bit
rate by being single layer.
It's been a quarter of a century since the entertainment
has been declaring that low bit rate is something
that consumers should never worry about, an attitude
that promotes and protects frauds.
So what if the bootlegs were made ten years ago to compete
in price alone with the formerly available legitimate
products? The wrongness of the fraud then remains a
fraud today. Here's the core of what makes the bootlegs a
fraud:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160412191509/https://www.shoutfactory.com/editorials/counterfeit-bootleg-media-faq
5. Poor Video and Audio Quality
Because the disc content has been compressed from a dual-layered source to a single-layered disc, bootlegs of our set often have terrible picture and audio quality, even when they play perfectly well on your equipment.
7. Disc Size
The best way to tell if your set is a bootleg is to check the size of one or more of the discs. The vast majority of our releases use dual-layered DVDs, which can hold up to 8.5 gigabytes of data. Bootleggers, on the other hand, use cheaper, single-layer discs, which can only hold up to 4.7 gigabytes of data. You can determine if your discs are single or dual-layered by checking their size in a DVD-ROM drive.
In other words, the bootlegs are defrauding consumers by not
disclosing that they are bootlegs. In order to avoid
fraud the sellers and manufacturers of the bootlegs must
have labels like this "WARNING: these bootleg DVDS have only
half the bit rate of the original".
both fully returned and refunded, but pushed me into buying
a used set of the real thing at more than twice the price
of the half bit rate garbage. Price alone does not designate
quality and the unwatchably low bit rate fakes make it
harder to find the real thing, which is out of print.
Pressed DVDs, large sets, do not qualify as the real if their
bit rate has been cut in half. The industry has poo poo'ed
bit rates for a long time and have packaged their stuff
with the strategy of "keep the customer ignorant", so
fostering the short sited legit makers to fail to point
point out that it is exactly the issue of bit rate that
demerits the bootlegs and causes customers to say, as they
so often say "oh no Shout Factory and Sony go down to only
1.5 bps for their theme songs now".
Shout Factory bootleg DVDs: low bit rate