Disc
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Star Wars Episode II, DVD, "CDMaster" Bootleg, USA 2002
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This was the first bootleg I aquired of Episode II, bought from from a US seller in July 2002. I call it the "CDMaster" version after the title on the main menu. It was a home-made DVD of a camcorded screening. The files are dated June 24th., just a month after the movie premiered in the cinemas.
Upon playback you're presented with a rudimentary chapter menu. The Fox fanfare is omitted, and the end credits are cut off after 10 seconds. The film is in letterboxed widescreen, but with very skewed geometry, so obviously the video camera was placed way below center of the cinema screen. The soundtrack is in the original English, and is encoded in the seldom used MPEG2 stereo format. It is tinny and shrill, with obvious compression artifacts. There is no subtitle track on the disc. This is a simple VideoCD in DVD clothing. The video is rendered in "half-D1" 352x240 resolution, half the resolution of a proper DVD, which may not be supported by all DVD players. (The entire disc is only 1.6 GB). All this points to the source being a VideoCD, just ported over to a DVD with a simple menu. Even the cover refers to this disc as "Compact Disc Digital Video". This bootleg was burned on DVD-R media. I tried playing the disc in 2010, but couldn't get it to work so I thought it had given up the ghost. I was able to rip the files in 2025 using a BD-ROM drive, but I am not expecting this disc to last much longer. Don't trust burned media, I'm telling you. Always make a back-up to your harddrive. I feel sorry for people who keep their home movies on DVD-R only. They'll be feeling sorry too. |
Main/Chapter menu Page 1
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Main/Chapter menu Page 2
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A long time ago...
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Title card
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Opening crawl
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Subtitles
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Subtitles
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No "To be angry is to be human" dialogue
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Subtitles
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Anakin doesn't reach for Padme's hand
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End credits
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End credits cut off here.
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