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I hesitate to respond, only because this is becoming somewhat off-topic to the article itself. That said, I was assuming the scenario of a counterfeit DVD that

I hesitate to respond, only because this is becoming somewhat off-topic to the article itself. That said, I was assuming the scenario of a counterfeit DVD that would play on any standard DVD player. Sure, there are more efficient compression algorithms now, but most aren't supported as standard on every DVD player out there. The base DVD specification is rather limited in codec support. Those Futurama counterfeits - which compression algorithm are they using? Will they play on all standard dvd players?

thaumasiotes 13y ago
Sadly, I don't know the answer to this; even the impeccably-licensed official translated Disney movies I've bought don't tend to work in US DVD players (region coded, I guess), so I never try. I play DVDs via computer (for one thing, that means I don't have to buy a DVD player in China; I already have computers). I don't have the discs with me, so it's impossible to check. :( I can think of a couple scenarios -- (a) my error, it's actually the same number of discs, but packed into one box instead of four boxes; (b) they're nonstandard, but still recognized as DVDs by VLC; (c) (highly speculative) something about the limited palette of cartoons makes them more susceptible to compression, and that was exploited. For what it's worth, the reason I included the qualifier "(for a western show)" is that I once bought a set of bootleg DVDs for a chinese TV show, and they were compressed to the point where I found them unwatchable. They still played through VLC; my best guess is that DVD-making software was used on ripped, heavily-compressed video files. It is entirely possible that something similar was done for my Futurama discs, although no compression was visible in that case.