Europe and Commerce

[maJ estY]

It's really unbelievable that the labels (do the labels decide that?) here in Europe are so greedy after money!
In the USA, "Live at Budokan" was released as 3CD and 2DVD package at the same time. Here, the DVD should have been released on Oct. 18th, hoping that more people buy the 3CD package then. This did obviously not happen, so the release date for Europe (at least for Germany) has been changed again to Nov. 29th!!! Is it really possible that I can buy these two DVDs TWO MONTHS later than the Americans? I am really angry about that. The DVDs are most likely already printed, aren't they? Doesn't it also cost money to host them?
I don't get it.

What do you think about that?

[Eric Zane]

A shame.
Really unbelievable.

[Pain Killer]

I have both items. The DVD is region 1 but my player is region free! I'm lucky :wink:

[Mr. Make Believe]

The reason for the late release of the Live at Budokan DVD does not have to do anything with money.

The US batch is produced in NTSC. Over here in europe we have the PAL format. Most DVD players are NTSC compatible but older TV's aren't. To make the DVD work for every european buyer the DVD has to be encoded in the PAL format. They didn't do this with the Latest Dream Theater release (tokyo/livetime) and there are people that can only few this DVD in black and white.

Beside the encoding, the DVD has documentaries featured within the bonus portion. Since there are still quite a few people over here in europe that don't understand the english language the documentary has to be translated. Subtitles for different languages will be available on the european release. This costs extra time. When the DVD is finished to be released in the US it isn't finished to be released in Europe.

The release date should have been 29th of october which seems reasonable considering the time needed to finish the production as mentioned above. The official release of the CD set was 29th of october as well. (At least here in the Netherlands is was) Offcourse since the CD set was allready available in the rest of the world and it doesn't need the post-production as the DVD the CD set made it to europ before the 29th of october. ANd was sold prior to it's official release date.

Since the US version of the DVD has production errors the DVD is delayed and pushed back to a release on the 29th of november to fix the errors. you could order the US region version. I wanted to do that, but since it contains errors I guess we'll have to wait for the fixed european release. There still isn't a fixed US release available.

It's a bitch waiting this long, but we will have a fully compatible working DVD when it is released.

[Darkmeteor]

isn't the date pushed back because of the 5.1 mix problem ?

I imported mine from amazon.com btw, was tired of waiting already 1 week after it was out in the US

[maJ estY]

Come on, don't tell me it takes two months to translate a few words and to fix a couple of errors!

The DT newsletter I got the day before yesterday said that the DVD was released on Oct. 18th, which was the first official release date.

[Nick]

i dont see a problem with a release in the UK.

same language (apart from spellings) and surely the PAL format isn't that hard to make.

ah well...problems happen.

[Bakerman]

The delay is because of the 5.1 mix problem.

[Mr. Make Believe]

Come on, don't tell me it takes two months to translate a few words and to fix a couple of errors!

The DT newsletter I got the day before yesterday said that the DVD was released on Oct. 18th, which was the first official release date.

Read the messages Jan :-) (sarcasm)

A month for the postprodiction, a month for the big fixes, which means new master, new pressing, new distribution.
Looks reasonable to me!
Your always dependend on the schedules of other companies when it comes to translations, mastering pressing etc...
If it wasn't for the bug we would have been watching it right now!!

[maJ estY]

OK, if it's really because of bug fixes, I am willed to wait, because that's better than having a "bad quality" version of the product. ;)

[Zorbas]

This is getting old. It's the second time these guys release a faulty DVD. I also ordered mine from Amazon. I don't ahve a 5.1 system set up but it anoyes me to know that should I put it working again that I won't be able to enjoy this thing in 5.1.
Can't these guys freaking sit down one afternoon and check EVERYTHING on the stupid discs before releasing them?!
I also have a faulty SFAM PAL DVD and now this shit again?!