Yes, you’re right.
Anyways, can we try not to derail this discussion?
Yeah sure of course. BATB is my favorite Disney movie which is why I can’t bring myself to watch the BD. All I do is look through it at paused scenes and digress. 😦
Anyways, I have a bootlegged Chinese DVD of the Diamond Edition.
It is very high quality, as far as a DVD will take it and has higher a bitrate than the official DVD for both video and audio.
It’s one of those Chinese DVD-9 bootlegs which deliberately mislabel it as a Blu-ray to note that it is sourced from a Blu-ray or just for the hell of it (usually the former).
And no, it’s not an AVCHD. It’s a standard DVD and can play in regular DVD players.
The DVD I have has no bonus material other than the soundtrack which is very highly compressed in 192kbps Dolby Digital 2.0 and it only contains the Special Edition and the audio commentary.
But this DVD has a higher bitrate for the audio, it’s in 640kbps Dolby Digital 5.1 downmixed from the Blu-ray’s DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 (again, unbelievable for a DVD since most DVDs have 448kbps and most people think 448kbps is the maximum for DVD). It also has a 1509kbps DTS 5.1 (extracted from the core of the 7.1 DTS-HD MA) in 24-bit/48khz.
But that’s only the English audio.
It also has Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai and Korean dubs in 384kbps Dolby Digital 5.1 and the French audio in 192kbps Dolby Digital 2.0.
It also has English SDH, French, Spanish, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Thai and Korean subtitles alongside subtitles in aforementioned languages for the audio commentary and sing along subtitles based on the Mandarin dub.
Bonus: The Mandarin version has Jackie Chan as the singing voice of the Beast and even sings the theme song in the end credits of the Mandarin dub alongside a Taiwanese singer named Sarah Chen.
They are more or less unofficial equivalents of Sony’s Superbit DVDs, having no bonus features for the sake of bitrate.
However, these DVDs may have bonus features like the occasional audio commentary and/or soundtrack.
There are a few with many bonus features but they are usually barebones aside from the occasional audio commentary and/or soundtrack.
But what I found really weird is that this version only has the Special Edition, without the “Theatrical” Edition nor the Work-in-Progress Edition in sight.
I know some bootlegs have seamless branching for movies with multiple versions.
I saw it on bootlegs of The Lion King and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
These “Blu-ray” DVD-9 bootlegs are the highest quality bootlegs I can see.
Again, they aren’t AVCHD and are just regular DVDs.
But these Chinese DVD-9 bootlegs in America, usually they only have wuxia films and the Studio Ghibli films (the Chinese love Studio Ghibli so much) there. They are apparently more common in Hong Kong and Philippines.
I saw plenty of them in my visits in both countries but never had the time to buy them.
Unlike most bootlegs, they aren’t that crazy looking and are pretty good imitations of the official versions, except for the misleading Blu-ray logo.