The Vineyard Man/The Man of the Vineyard

Link to DramaWiki article: http://wiki.d-addicts.com/The_Vineyard_Man

DVD set was purchased on eBay but can also be bought from other online stores. DVD looks official but is probably bootlegged because the picture is simply a re-encode of the HDTV broadcast on KBS2 in Korea (or a re-encode of the AVI of the HDTV broadcast). The packaging is cheap: a plastic box with an unattached booklet of sleeves to hold the DVDs inside. You get what you pay for: it costs me less than $14 dollars, including shipping. The standard total price seems to be about $20.

DVD region: all (no restriction)

Episodes: 16 episodes on 8 DVDs. No extras.

Aspect ratio: supposed to be 16:9 widescreen, but the person who encode the DVD messed up, so the picture is stretched to 4:3 fullscreen if you watch it on a regular TV. If you have widecreen TV or if your TV can be forced into a widescreen mode, then the picture will look right. However, a couple of episode was encoded in 4:3 mode, and these episodes look OK on a standard TV, but the quality of the video is worse than the other episodes.

Video quality: as mentioned above, a re-encode of the HDTV broadcast in Korea. The quality is decent but not the best, and at least one part has jerky motion (encoding error). The AVI released on the Internet probably have better quality.

Audio language: Korean and Chinese. Audio quality is decent but not the best, again due to it simply being a re-encode of the HDTV broadcast or perhaps a re-encode of the AVIs released on the Internet. One more thing: the audio in the cheap menu is extra loud.

Subtitle: English and Chinese. The English subs is horrible and is full of spelling and grammar errors. It seems more than one subber work on the translation as some parts are intelligible while other parts are just horrendous.

I've watched this series on KBS World and also on YouTube, and I love the show so much that I got the DVDs. However, I suggest you wait for the fansub version, which is still in progress. YouTube is missing a couple of episodes. There is currently no official DVD released in North America, so any version you buy with English subtitle will probably have bad subtitles. I have included a picture of the version I bought.

Overall grade: D.

Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 3:51 pm Post subject: Post Rating: 0

Sounds like a typical Taiwan or Malaysia hack job. I can't tell you how many dvd's like this I've thrown into the trash... It's a shame that some older shows are ONLY available in this kind of quality.

Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 1:11 pm Post subject: Post Rating: 0

gosh i bought What happen in Bali and the pics not sync with the sound and its from Malaysia... damn...