Looking for info on this bootleg set

[eledoremassis02]

There usually packaged with a lot of lots on I see for sale



I know they are dragon box bootlegs, but what is there quality like? Does anyone have pictures of video of these sets? What is their origin?

[kei17]

I've been wondering how this bootleg sounds, too. Can anybody upload some clips?

[bkev]

Well here's a screenshot I found going back through the forum some:


Grainless with some compression artifacts and haphazardly boosted saturation; despite this, it appears to be sourced from the Dragon Box. Subtitles of average quality for this type of bootleg, complete with name swaps (Roshi->Master Goten). Not worth your time at all, even as bootlegs go.

[Tzigi]

Grainless with some compression artifacts and haphazardly boosted saturation; despite this, it appears to be sourced from the Dragon Box. Subtitles of average quality for this type of bootleg, complete with name swaps (Roshi->Master Goten). Not worth your time at all, even as bootlegs go.

Never tried any bootlegs but heard that they tend to be bizarre in their translation but how on earth did they come up with Master Goten? Is there some demonstrable train of thoughts underlying this?

[NeverRamza]

There was a very short period of time where the only English subtitled version of Yu Yu Hakusho was through bootleg DVD's and if I remember correctly, Hiei and Kurama had their names switched in every instance their name was spoken. It was pretty awful. Rumor has it many of the subtitles on these sets were first were translated to Chinese and then from that to English, possibly aided by machine translation. I wouldn't be surprised if then some find-and-replace job was then done on the script to try to get the character names right which was then botched royally.

I've seen some of the first Dragon Box bootleg set and it's awful with bad encoding and the script issues mentioned. Random lines go by untranslated as well if I remember correctly. It's pretty unwatchable.

[superrayman3]

Since I own the first set I can provide a little bit more detailed information about these sets, interestingly the people who did these sets actually used dual layered DVD's as opposed to the usual single layer DVD's (which surprised me since usually Chinese/Malaysian bootlegers like to cut corners and be as cheap as possible), each set has either 3-4 discs (the first set has 3 but I'm not going to say that every set has 3 discs since I don't own any of the other sets, so if any of the later sets included the Bardock, Trunks specials or the other extras those sets might possibly have 4 discs instead), as pointed out before the footage was lifted from the Japanese DBOX's but had some modifications, for one thing the footage has quite a bit more compression and has had its saturation bumped up a bit (probably because the bootleggers thought the footage looked too faded) to the point where there are issues with crushed blacks, also for some reason the NEP's were removed, if I could take a guess as to why the NEP's were cut I'd say it was to shave off space so they could squeeze in as many episodes as possible which for the first set is 9 episodes per disc, the audio quality from what I can tell sounds just like the DBOX audio, hope this info helps.

[eledoremassis02]

Thank you very much! That is actually a big help

[funrush]

There was a very short period of time where the only English subtitled version of Yu Yu Hakusho was through bootleg DVD's and if I remember correctly, Hiei and Kurama had their names switched in every instance their name was spoken. It was pretty awful. Rumor has it many of the subtitles on these sets were first were translated to Chinese and then from that to English, possibly aided by machine translation. I wouldn't be surprised if then some find-and-replace job was then done on the script to try to get the character names right which was then botched royally.

I've seen some of the first Dragon Box bootleg set and it's awful with bad encoding and the script issues mentioned. Random lines go by untranslated as well if I remember correctly. It's pretty unwatchable.

I've also heard of the Japanese to Chinese to English theory. And usually the results turn out to be awful. If you get the time I suggest you look up stuff from the Yugioh bootlegs because it's pretty bad.

[bkev]

^You got it. The same thing likely causes a lot of the translation errors on these sets; I had one of their original series boxes a long time ago. I'm pretty sure they all come with English as the secondary subtitle language, with Chinese being the first selectable.

[Adamant]

Grainless with some compression artifacts and haphazardly boosted saturation; despite this, it appears to be sourced from the Dragon Box. Subtitles of average quality for this type of bootleg, complete with name swaps (Roshi->Master Goten). Not worth your time at all, even as bootlegs go.

Never tried any bootlegs but heard that they tend to be bizarre in their translation but how on earth did they come up with Master Goten? Is there some demonstrable train of thoughts underlying this?

Roshi means old master, and "Muten" is pretty close to "Goten", so "Muten-roshi" ending up as "Master Goten" after some telephone translations by Chinese pirates who didn't care that much about making sure they heard every name right is reasonable enough.

Hell, at least it's closer than "Master Roshi", and that's something an official licensee came up with.

[Thouser]

To be more specific about the "Master Goten" thing, in Chinese, the characters for Muten (武天) and Goten (悟天) are both pronounced Wutian. Hence Wutian Laoshi (武天老師) becomes... Wutian Laoshi (悟天老師). Or, at the very least, whoever translated the Chinese subs into English new that one of the Wutians was "Goten" in English, and assumed it was true for the other Wutian as well.