I bought a Sony VCD player at home. I can watch all the copyright VCD. However, when I watch the pirate VCD, my VCD player wont able to read the VCD. I asked the VCD seller about this, they recognized the problem right a way and give me another pirate one, AND IT WORKS. He told me that we need to use pirate VCD player to watch pirate VCD. If you use brand name VCD player, you may not able to watch all the pirate VCD unless you told them you are using brand name VCD player before you buy the VCD. Therefore, I dont watch any more pirate VCD. However, I would like to know if anyone know the trick about the pirate VCD and VCD player. Will that be true that there are different VCD writing format?

-- Wong (wwong@tuvps.com), July 22, 1999

Answers

Pirate VCDs are not industrial standard VCDs and are not subjected to stringent QC procedures and you may have problems playing them on some players, brand name or not.

Over in SEA where most software is pirated, VCD player retailers would be able to recommend brands that can play pirate VCDs. Sony VCD players seem to have a reputation of being "sensitive" with regards to bootlegs. So far I have noticed a good number of pirate VCD retailers in Singapore and Malaysia use dedicated JVC vcd players to test VCDs for customers, I have seen pirate VCDs which suffer "stutters" and "breakups" brought back to these retailers and then play fine on their machines.....Hmm. No brand VCD Players made in China are also reputed to play bootleg VCDs fine.

But finally, it just boils down to you knowing the correct people to recommend you a good VCD player to play bootlegs, based on usage and experience, or else it just becomes a gamble........a price you have to pay for watching bootlegs.

-- Sethsolo (Sethsolo@hotmail.com), July 23, 1999.

As a matter of fact vcd are also used very much in Pakistan. And we have pirated cd copied from orignal. My CD player is Panasonic and plays every movie, which i take on rental. I think Panasonic is best but on scrathes (probaly made by computer cd player), shows errors but the same disk works fine on p.c....

-- M.Yusuf M.Baluch (yusuf1@rocketmail.com), August 09, 1999.