Bought a dodgy DVD from eBay.

[Feek]

Well well well...

After my post about Men Behaving Badly and the six disk set, I thought I'd complete my collection and I picked up the final three episodes on DVD for a mere £4.99 plus £1.49 postage. I thought it cheap, but the seller has huge feedback and it's the sort of item that gets knocked out cheaply.

When it arrived it was obviously a budget version, no insert in the case.

All works OK until 5 minutes from the end of the final episode when it hung and refused to play. I thought that perhaps I could rip it and see if it'll play locally.

DVD-Decryptor reported errors straight away and also reported no copy protection and the disk being multi-region. The disk itself is pure silver coloured and not the goldy tint it should be for a mult-layer disk.

So I mailed the seller..

Hi, I just played the last episode on this disk and it all failed about 5 minutes from the end. I thought I'd see if I could rip it and play it from my hard drive but it fails. Interestingly there's no copy protection on it and it's region free.

The auction says it's region 2, which it isn't.

What's the score, dodgy disk?

Lots of love,
Feek

I expected a brush-off but received the following:

Dear Feek

Apologies for that, please return item along with a brief description of the problem and your full name and address (paypal if poss) and price paid and a refund or a replacement will be sent as soon as it arrives here and please incude you ebay item number so we can deal with your return quickly.

It's outside his seven day return policy and I was expecting something like "ha ha, sucker" as a reply so hopefully it will get sorted.

[Desmo]

You probably didn't get the ha ha sucker as he doesn't want too many complaints coming in and getting himself proper busted. You'll probs get another copy as your replacement.

[Feek]

As long as the replacement works, I don't really care.

[Dymetrie]

Ordered 'Bernard and the Genie' from someone on ebay just before christmas.

It turned up really quickly and was obviously a copy (despite being sealed in plastic). The cover was a not great colour copy, the disc was blatantly a DVD-R...

However, it played fine on my PS2 and was pretty decent quality so I was happy

[divine]

I don't understand why people would be happy paying for something they know is a pirate copy...

If you don't care, why not just download it yourself? You aren't paying for anything towards the original makers just some geezer with a few machines churning out discs.

[Fayshun]

Don't forget kids, DVD pirates use raw kittens as fuel for their evil deeds.

[Feek]

In this case I've not been able to find a good copy to grab and at a fiver, I don't mind. The disk isn't a writeable so it's not as bad as it sounds.