[Marbles]

So a friend and I are sitting in my backyard watching our kids play and drinking some beer.  My daughter comes over and asks if she can have a dog.  I reply "if you can teach it to poop in the toilet you can!"

Friend asks if I've ever seen "Bruce Almighty"?  Nope I reply.  Do you want to borrow it?  Yea, but is it out yet?

Ah, I have a friend who downloads them he says...I don't ask and he doesn't tell how he gets them.

OK, I'd like to see it.  So he brings over 2 disks for the movie.  The video is really shaky and the audio sounds like its mono.

It's a good copy he told me, one of the better ones!  I thought the video and audio sucked!

I think I'll just rent copies after they come out as it's a much better experience IMO.

What do you guys think?

[bob82274]

Ah gotta love the bootlegs  

I have seen my share of bootlegs and I don't even bother with those shaky-cam disks.  The way he probably got it was from a P2P software like Kazaa.  I have found that copy's known as "screeners" are much better as really they are from a promotional DVD that is handed out to groups in the media.  They don't come out as soon as the shaky-cam versions but they can come out months in advance of the real DVD.

[bubba966]

I don't bother with bootlegs as I can't stand the crappy quality.

I honestly don't care for screeners either. The rental screeners are worse than the academy screeners. But I don't care for the "warning/screener" tags every so often during playback.

What I do enjoy though is importing.

Like when I finally got my copy of 28 Days Later from the UK last Wednesday (it opened in theaters 2 days later). Everyone thinks that one's a bootleg as they've not realized it's a British and was released there a while back.

Or the copy of Crouching Tiger I had from HK a week after release. Also had Snatch, Memento, The Dish, Slap Her She's French, and more either during the first few weeks of release, or even before it's released here.

[Rob Babcock]

He he, hehehehu...Zombies!...he eh...must see 28 Days Later!

[jqp]

So what we are saying is that "bootlegs" are made by taking a camcorder into the theater and making a "copy" of the film (like they did in the episode of Seinfeld). It is not a trasnsfer to DVD from film. A screener is  a less than commercail quality version of the upcoming DVD (it deters copying of the screener version)

[bob82274]

That is is exactly what we are saying.  And bubba I agree if I had the equipment I would import (and I might get that sometime in the future) and I agree that the screeners arn't as good as the real thing but at the same time I wouldn't pay a dime for them.

[JoshK]

I have a few dozen screeners from my good ol dayz in college when I use to trade music/movies online.   But like you said they look and sound like crap.  But on your 15" computer monitor when you are bored and avoiding studying they worked just fine.

[bubba966]

So what we are saying is that "bootlegs" are made by taking a camcorder into the theater and making a "copy" of the film (like they did in the episode of Seinfeld).

I would add a screener to the list of bootleg sources. But usually it's bootlegged via some other source before a screener of any type is available.

I don't think I'd rule out film as a bootleg source either. I've seen some fairly decent Asian bootlegs that were transfers off film. They're still not as good as the screeners usually are, but they don't have timecode or anything else a screener usually has.