07-22-2004, 04:49 PM
Quote:However some of their anime are distributed in VCD format. For example: Hunter X Hunter is in distributed in vcd format in the cantonese dub with no subtitles. I think that those vcds are licensed even though they are vcds, people in china don't like to read the chinese subtitles so they dub it and not sub it.
Re: HxH
They also come in DVD format. First i got the bootleg dvd set which also had cantonese chinese audio put onto the hk, in addition to the jap audio & eng subs. I liked it so much i bought the official Hong Kong DVD Set which has cantonese audio only. It was only about US$70.
The stuff with cantonese dub only tends to be hong kong licensed stuff. This is presumably cheaper to license since it is for the domestic market (hong kong is the size of a city, albeit with a pretty large population) and overseas chinese. Often they are vcd only since they are cheap and popular. Price is a big issue since bootlegging totally killed off the movie industry for a while but also had the effect of reducing prices of many movies etc to an absolute pittance.
For domestic movies now, the pirates can actually be more expensive or the same price as the official ones.
Mainland china is a little different. Stuff is even cheaper there due to the standard of living. In hong kong bootlegs are efforts to crack down on bootlegs. China - i doubt there is much done about it. Price is king.
Amazingly some mainland China licensed stuff has bootleg quality and at times they even use bootleg sources. :eek: And when they license something sometimes they do not have rights to use english audio on it but do they care?
So in mainland china:
1) Just because it is cheap does not necessarily mean it is bootleg.
I got plenty official hollywood movie vcds & dvds for US$3.
2) Just because they ripped a bootleg does not necessarily mean that it is not licensed.
Confused??
There has been ocassions where the bootlegs have had better packaging and video quality than my official versions of tv series and anime. V_V Go figure. Often they have audio options not available in the official versions too.