I buy plenty of bootleg DVDs - all are for concerts or Are any of them good? I just purchased then new Jean M J album and it's pretty good. I like the remakes with the new equipment alot! I wish boris would do something like that. I haven't listened to the 5.1 channel dvd part yet but the concept is really cool though. The sound quality is amazing.
The most important part of any bootleg is the source material. With the exception of some very dedicated fans out there that actually go as far as essentially "remastering" a recording (by combining soundtracks from CD or DAT with an older VHS picture, or by even trying to do some remastering of the video image) 99% of bootlegs out there will essentially be a re-encoding of some old format onto a new format. So either it's old LPs being put onto CDs or it's VHS tape being transferred to DVD-R. I'll use Jean Michel Jarre as my example because he has released many videos over the years and is widely bootlegged. (So far he has only released two official DVDs, one a cut down version of the "Oxygene in Moscow" concert, and the new "Aero" album, which is really a DVD-Audio style album, which just happens to have a video track as well. (For those who don't know, "Aero" comes in a double pack of a CD and a DVD, both with exactly the same tracks, but the DVD has 5.1 Surround and a video track of a pair of eyes, recorded in a single take, 'reacting' to the music.) (Incidentally, it's now almost impossible to buy even the "Oxygene in Moscow" DVD in PAL format. 99% of the copies out there are a second-rate NTSC Brazilian release.) Do a bit of searching on eBay and you find countless other Jarre DVDs for purchase though, and the quality can vary. For example, I recently bought two from the same seller: Place de la Concorde and Akropolis. Place de la Concorde is one of his very first concerts from back in 1979, while Akropolis was much more recent in 2001. As such, the source material for each recording was quite different too. Concorde was from an old VHS tape, while Akropolis would appear to be from at least a SVHS recording from a digital cable broadcast. The sound on Concorde was passable, but if you've ever listened to a 20+ year old VHS tape you know what to expect. The sound on Akropolis was excellent, reflecting the newer recording, but probably also the better sound at the concert itself too. There was even more difference in the picture quality. DVD has higher picture definition than VHS, so we all come to expect beautiful pictures from DVD. But converting a VHS tape into a DVD-R does allow you to add any extra quality that has already been lost. For a tape of this age you're bound to get minor tracking issues (static at the top or bottom of the image throughout) and the occasional full-screen glitch too, and this recording was no exception. But the colour was still fairly rich, suggesting that this was at least probably only a second generation recording. (If you copy a VHS tape to another tape, then copy the copy, and again a few time, you find that colour is usually the first thing to go, then the picture starts to jump a lot, and finally the sound starts to distort as well.) The picture on the Akropolis DVD-R was much better. It was a very good image with only an occasional "digital glitch" (usually a few square boxes appear in part of the picture for a few moments) to indicate that this was a broadcast recording. (Oh, plus the TV station's logo in the bottom left constantly!) Finally, we should consider the packaging. These particular DVDs came packaged in regular DVD cases with a cover printed to a reasonable quality on an inkjet printer. The discs themselves had also been given inkjet printed labels and looked rather good. The Concorde DVD had no menu system to speak of, just a static background image and an option to play the concert. The Akropolis DVD was much more professional with option to select individual tracks or play or, plus some "bonus features" of the TV trailers used to promote the broadcast. Despite the massive differences in quality I was happy with both purchases. The Akropolis DVD was good enough that if it had been a legitimate release I would have only felt slightly disappointed. The Concorde DVD was extremely scrappy by comparison, but given the age of the source material I think I would be lucky to find a better quality version out there. Me recommendation to everybody is to be an informed consumer and to make sure you pay a fair price for your DVD bootlegs. Ask the seller questions about things like the source material, the menu system, etc. And always remember that the bootleggers can produce an endless stream of copies, so don't find yourself in a bidding war with another buyer since if you wait a week another copy will be up for sale. The moment the record company realises there is a market out there, gets off their arses and re-releases some of these old video recordings on DVD is the moment that I will stop buying the bootlegs and start buying the real thing. I'd love to give them, and the artist, my money, but at the moment they have nothing to offer me in return. And so the bootlegger will continue to profit from me instead, for the foreseeable future. Michael