Why are the quality of Malaysian and Hong Kong-distributed video CDs (the official/licensed releases, not counterfeits) seem to be poorly made? The quality of the picture of most movies seem blocky, faded or washed-out and the audio can sometimes be inaudible (The Replacement Killers by Era) or sound as if a speaker was blown out (i.e. The Fifth Element by HVN). Even VHS movies look and sound better (on the first 2 viewings, of course).

Also, some of you might notice that a number of cover blurbs (Die Hard with a Vengeance VCD for example) and English subtitles in the movies have awkward spelling and grammatical errors. All slipshod work. Obviously, the notion of quality control and assurance seems to be alien to them.

Okay, I don't expect DVD-like quality or features on VCD but can't those Asian companies/distributors at least do a better job?

Thanks for reading!

-- (cv@cv.com), January 12, 2002

Answers

It has been my limited experience that VCDs made by Disney and Fox are definitely a cut above everything else. Your comments are exactly right about other official VCDs that I have bought. I think that producers take very little care to properly encode their VCDs which is why they look so bad. I have several Jackie Chan and Jet Li films on VCD and the only one that doesn't look like crap is _Drunken Master II_, which looks like someone actually tried to do a decent job. I've never had sound problems, but I've seen lots of blockiness. It's tough to eliminate blocks altogether at the low bit rates of VCD, but they can be greatly reduced with proper encoding. The problem with the subtitles is that in these cases, someone just recorded a low quality Hong Kong version of a film. Well, I guess it might be a Singapore or Malaysia version, but it's probably from Hong Kong. Hong Kong films are notorious for their poor English subtitles. I think it was director Tsui Hsark who explained that subtitling was given almost no money and very little time to do, so some Chinese person is hired to do the subtitles in maybe 2 days, resulting in the slipshod quality. Could they do a better job? Absolutely. I can make VCDs at home with better quality than a lot of what I've bought. Will they do a better job? Probably not. The industry seems to not care about quality and apparently the customers don't care either. It is also possible that they are deliberately not putting out higher quality VCDs because bootlegging is such a problem. Why waste time and money to improve quality if it's just going to be bootlegged anyway?

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), January 14, 2002.