Jon Rahoi has an excellent article on buying and watching Chinese pirate DVDs at Hollywood Elsewhere. My experience exactly. I went to a Chinese market and bought a handful of DVDs just to see – and Jon’s observation that the film studios don’t have much to fear, at least not at the current level of sophistication, is entirely correct. Out of 8 DVDs, two are unusable, either because of technical problems or because the copy is shot in a cinema with a handicam. For the rest, both quality and quantity suffers – I got the three Lord of the Rings movies for $2 apiece, but rest assured, I will buy the three-disk extended edition when it eventually comes out. The quality is so bad that in the scene where the hobbits are cheered by the inhabitants of Gondor, you can barely see their faces.
Didn’t get any pirated music CDs, though – I assume the quality would have been better there. Seems you get what you pay for, up to a point.