Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Just received this and started digging around in the DVDs... As others have complained, this is *not* a licensed Studio Ghibli product. In fact, it's not even a particularly good bootleg. The DVDs are amateurishly mastered; this means the DVDs internal labeling structure is screwed up, in some cases the wrong subtitles were included, language codes are often incorrect, etc. Worst of all, the original videos were ripped at reduced bitrate MPEG2 (the video codec used in DVDs) in order to make 2-3 videos fit on a single dual-layer DVD. Unlike modern MPEG4-based codecs, MPEG2 doesn't handle reduced bitrate gracefully at all, meaning there is a direct and noticeable impact on visual clarity. To put it plainly, the video quality is horrible. People saying the video quality is flawless either have very poor quality screens, eye problems, or are simply speaking out of ignorance. The raw audio was extracted from the original DVDs, however, so that at least is lossless and will sound exactly like the real licensed product. Which, by the way, you should be buying instead of this knockoff. I realize this box set is much cheaper than buying all of the real Studio Ghibli videos one at a time, and there's some appeal there. But the difference in quality alone is worth it, not to mention the special features, and the fact that you're not buying pirated media. Don't kid yourself, that's exactly what this is.