I just read your column and I figured I'll share some of my experience regarding HK VCD. Although HK is notorious for having many bootleg VCD, there are a lot of legitimate VCD's from HK companies that have acquired the rights legally from Japanese companies. As far as I know, all VCD at www.asiacd.com are licensed ones. I can't say the same for the ones at www.sasavcd.com though. I have bought several anime VCD from www.asiacd.com and I am happy to say all their qualities are excellent. The quality is on the same level as VHS tape. The one advantage of the VCD from HK is that they are usually released pretty close to the same date as the Japanese ones. And in some cases, even before the US releases. Titles like Kare Kano, GTO, Gasaraki and Utena have all been released in HK already.

Regarding the Eng sub VCD from Singapore...I have bought an Evangelion VCD set from a Singaporean seller from Ebay. unfortunately, the seller didn't disclose the fact that the VCD has been edited. Apparently, the VCD was approved by the Singapore Censorship board which has cut out some slight nudity from the show. So I am a bit reluctant to buy anything from Singapore again...

Hope you find the info helpful.

Regarding VCD's from Singapore, one thing I would be careful of is whether or not the movie has been cut. Reading the HK movie newsgroups, it appears that HK movies on VCD's coming out of Singapore are legitimate, but often have major sections cut from the film due to the Singaporean censors' particularly strong aversion to violence. I would imagine that a similar situation holds for anime VCD's, though I haven't any direct experience.

Just saw you bit about anime VCD's. I've got Tenchi Muyo in Love! on VCD and I'm really impressed with the quality of it. Apart from when there are lots of fast moving actions going on at once (where it goes distinctly blocky), the quality is far above the PAL VHS tape my friend has. The sound is fantastic too.

On the other hand, I've seen a couple of episodes of Evangelion on VCD and the quality was pretty appalling. They looked like they'd be digitized from a set of NTSC subbed tapes.

Because of this, my experience of VCD's is mixed. However, they are cheaper and don't degrade like VHS does, but I'd never chose one over a DVD. Never ever.

Hello there. Here's some information from what I have come to gather from buying both live-action and anime Video CDs. For one thing, they range from near VHS quality to really horrible real video/vivo quality. It all depends on the both the original master source and the mastering itself, though one thinks that the mastering for VCD's are cheap. The answer is no. With the bootlegs, most of these VCD's are mastered from computers with software mpeg-1 compression; commercial or licensed discs are usually much better in quality, depending on the encoder. If you asked me, I have seen very good quality

VCD's. So what's up with the bad quality of VCD's?

Well, it's because VCD's uses the MPEG-1 video compression (which is about 5-7 years old) and back then when it came out, it was great! With MPEG-1 video compression, the amount of memory put to quality was only stable roughly 10mbs per minute. So each VCD can hold up to 74 minutes of both video and audio at 740mbs (audio write). Because the amount of memory is constant, the quality for fast scenes become garbled (pixelization) and digital artifacts (aura of pixels appear on edges) due to the low memory. With the current MPEG-2 video compression, the quality is much better due to many new options and of course, the "variable bitrate" which allows the compression to change A very known problem with animation is that it requires more data than average live action films. Because of the VCD constant data range, the quality of animes aren't too bad but don't look as good as live action films on VCD. But most of the times with licensed anime VCD's from both Hong Kong and Taiwan, the quality is rather good. Heck, my licensed Taiwanese VCD of Hayao Miyazaki's "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" is one of my best anime VCD's.

It is sometimes much cheaper buying animes on VCD's rather than spending $50+ on the import VHS tapes or LDs. Of course, "Laputa" is my favorite anime all time and I wouldn't be able to afford the remastered LD of the movie in a $1000+ out of print LD collection but the VCD was mastered from that probable source. Of course, it's not perfect (there are still moments of pixelization due to the limitations), it is better in quality than my old fansub tape. 

With the prices, most online VCD dealers are charging too damn high! For most of the times, VCD's can cost you around $5-15 with licensed VCD's while bootlegs are usually $1-5.

I hope that I have given you some more information about VCD's. Yes, there are many bootlegged discs as well as official licensed discs. And watching the better VCD's on my Sony 530D DVD is a little bit better quality than playing on my computer. If there should be anymore questions, please feel free to email me back.

From Eugene Wong:

Here's what I know about Singaporean anime VCD's:

1) They seem to be legitimate - there's licensing info on the box (though that could be faked, but I kinda doubt that, the authorities here take a dim view of shenanigans like that)

2) Picture quality - Singaporean VCD's look great for mpeg1. They play wonderfully on a VCD player onto television. Pixellation is obvious, however, if you play them full-screen on a computer. Sitting away from the monitor (and squinting! just like the early days of VGA) solves the problem. As with all mpeg1 video, artifacts are unavoidable during fast action

scenes. Overall, well-encoded VCD's (from LD or DVD sources) look as good as if not better than VHS.

3) Sound - stereo at 44.1khz (CD quality) Some Hong Kong VCD's however encode mono Japanese and Cantonese (the dialect of spoken Chinese used in Hong Kong) onto the left and right tracks separately.

4) Subtitles - entirely readable since the same subbing process as video tape is used.

5) Availability - I've seen Evangelion, Blue Seed, Ushio and Tora, and Gundam0083 boxed sets. All of them are Japanese dubbed, English subbed. I can attest to the quality of the Gundam0083 VCD's as I own a set. They're the best VCD's that I've seen so far, at the equivalent of US$90, they had better be ;-) Excellent video and audio quality, attractive silk-screened covers, eminently readable subtitles, and entirely legit (the publisher expounds on the fact that they've licensed the series). I can't say much about the other 3 series, I don't own them or have seen them.

The low-down on Hong Kong VCD's:

1) Picture and sound quality could vary greatly depending on whether video tape (some taped from TV or even hand-held video cameras smuggled into the cinema - just ask anyone who has an early copy of the Eva movies) or LD/DVD sources were used. But the quality of recent releases has been excellent as buyers are getting more discerning.

2) They're subtitled in Chinese with the original Japanese soundtrack. Sometimes they're dubbed in Cantonese or have dual language tracks.

3) Legitimacy is iffy. Licensed HK VCD's can cost up to 5 times as much as their 'gray' counterparts.

Anime VCD's are the medium of choice among anime fans in Singapore and Hong Kong. They're fast (in terms of release times), cheap and portable. Most serious anime fans in Singapore patronize the hand-full of shops that import anime VCD's direct from Hong Kong.

The better VCD's released in the past year include the Kenshin OVA series, Bebop (all 26 eps!), Blue submarine #6 and Orphen. The VCD manufacturers are extremely prolific, virtually anything popular released on LD in Japan gets the VCD treatment within 2 months.

---

Hong Kong DVDs

These have recently become available. I've seen some of the Ghibli movies (nausicca, Laputa, Totoro, whisper of the heart), gundams (Char's counterattack), the Macross plus movie, macross2 OVA, Macross: do you remember love, Akira, spriggan, the Gundam wing TV series (crammed 5 episodes to a DVD) and others.

Video and audio quality of these DVDs pale in comparison to US or Japanese DVDs. This is probably due to the age of the masters used (mainly LDs), which cause video to be slightly degraded and there aren't any fancy remastered AC-3 soundtracks for most titles.

Subtitle quality varies considerably. Some DVDs have English sub tracks, but the language used is horrible (grammar and spelling that could give an English teacher a stroke), so much so that I rather read the Chinese subs than the English subs.

The manufacturing quality of the DVDs is also quite poor. The covers are poorly done and I've a couple of discs with unequal weight distributions that cause my DVD drive to hum loudly.