Modern day "bootleg" and "pirate" copies have come a long way from the dodgy VHS tapes of yesteryear. Remember those Disney trailers where they would split the screen and show you a side-by-side comparison of a
genuine Disney VHS vs. a poor quality copy? (Not sure if they had something similar outside the UK but most of my Disney videos have these on.)
Anyway, thanks to digital encoding there is
no visible difference between a Disney DVD and a pirate Disney DVD (assuming they are doing direct digital copies and not re-encoding). In fact, copies generally look
better on my old telly as the Macrovision on the originals causes the top of the screen to shimmer. [I have therefore backed up my entire Disney catalogue (VHS and DVD) onto DVD-Rs which I watch instead... but hey, that's another story...]
Where was I? Oh yeah, a lot of the pirate Disney DVDs look very convincing. Full colour character artwork on the disc and professionally printed inlays - sometimes even inserts!
So, your "Limited Issue" Jungle Book that you bought off eBay has just arrived and you want to know whether it's genuine or not? (I'm using 'Jungle Book' as an example cos it appears to be the most pirated Disney DVD ever!)
Well, if you don't have an original to compare it with you could be fooling yourself that your copy is genuine!
Here a few easy tests you can do to check. The
genuine Disney "Limited Issue" US DVDs were dual-encoded Region 1 and Region 4. To prevent copying they included analog
Macrovision in addition to digital
CSS and RCE protection!
Of course, these days
anyone with a PC and a DVD writer can make a perfect copy of 'Jungle Book' (or 'Lady & The Tramp', or '101 Dalmatians') as the original is on a DVD-5 disc (
i.e. single side, single layer) so no extra compression is needed to fit it on a 4.7Gb blank disc!
One foolproof way I have of checking whether a disc is original or not - and so far I haven't seen this method posted
anywhere - is simply to pop the disc into your PC DVD drive! Using freeware like <a href="http://www.dvddecrypter.com">DVD Decrypter</a> or <a href="
http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video ... cfm">Smart Ripper</a> you can examine exactly what is on the disc!
Let's use <a href="http://www.dvddecrypter.com">DVD Decrypter</a> for our example. A
genuine US Disney 'Jungle Book' should show the following information:
<img src="
http://beanos.co.uk/images/jungle.gif">
(I've blurred out destination box as this just displays system info.)
As you can see the disc is R1 & R4 with CSS & RCE. Pirate copies (which are usually just DVD rips) don't bother with regional coding or copy protection and usually advertise the fact that they are "region free" or "all region" DVDs.
All genuine Disney DVDs will have regional coding, Macrovision and CSS copy protection.
They don't seem to bother with RCE anymore (the last title I have with RCE is 'Aristocats' from May 2002) but I've never seen the point of RCE on back-catalogue titles anyway!
If you can't test your disc on a PC then try copying from your DVD player to your VHS recorder. Genuine Disney DVDs won't copy due to the analog Macrovision signal included whereas, once again, bootleggers don't bother with such unnecessary protection which, as I mentioned before, only degrades the picture [sorry, all this copy protection is a little bugbear of mine - although I'm happy to say that, to date, there is currently
no CD, DVD or VHS that I haven't been able to copy - but that's beside the point].
So there you have it!
disneyunlimited's method of checking whether your eBay purchase is the real McCoy, or not!
So far,
every Asian and Far Eastern copy I've examined have been missing CSS and regional coding which suggest they're all boots although I'm sure there must be
some genuine Disney's from these countries...(!?)
Maybe forum members can check their DVDs to see just how widespread Disney bootlegging is. Obviously, if you've bought your discs from reputable stores this shouldn't be a problem, but buying from eBay is like buying from any street market seller and when it comes to "out of print" titles I reckon there are more bootlegs on offer than genuine discs! (Sorry to disagree with you,
pleasurebay - perhaps it's because I'm in the UK and when I buy Region 1 I have to select "Available to the United Kingdom" which brings up all those dodgy pirates!)
"Sad but true" (as Metallica once said...)
Hope you stick around.
. On that note
everyone is very kind and someone always has the answer to your questions I look foward to posting with you 
? Does anyone else notice how the dialogue randomly starts rhyming?
