I did some digging yesterday on the multiple DVD editions of House of Flying Daggers due out this month and here's what I've turned up:
As near as I can tell the cheap Zoke edition is a bootleg. It's listed as having burned in subtitles, which is a dead giveaway. It's also being manufactured in Hong Kong, where the official rights holder is Edko - another dead giveaway. Thus, the Zoke edition will most likely be fairly low quality and one to avoid.
Then there's the Chinese mainland edition which doesn't include subtitles of any sort. This one is not widely available outside the mainland so it's not much of an issue.
Then there's the Edko release, which will be the high quality, official edition. It's 16:9 anamorphic with removable subs and 5.1 audio. I've also seen three different release dates given for it so far - Oct 15th, 18th and 20th.
How to tell which edition you're getting? Luckily enough the covers are significantly different from each other so it's not too difficult. The Edko cover is the one attached to this article. Note the color of the Chinese character. The Zoke cover is here. The key difference is that the Chinese glyph is red on the Zoke version, and there's also an additional row of lettering on this one. So: white writing good, red writing bad. If you're one of those who jumped on the chance to order through YesAsia you can rest assured that you're getting the Edko release. They don't stock boots, which rules Zoke out, and a look at their cover image confirms that they're stocking the white lettered Edko release.
Can't wait to get my hands on a copy of this. Loved the film (although not quite as good as hero) when I saw it at This years TIFF. Looking forward to doing a screening of this in early November at KBT.
I got some email from people asking how to tell the difference between the one from Zoke and the one from Edko because some retailers (notably YesAsia) don't list the manufacturer in their listings ... people that pre-ordered from YA wanted to make sure they weren't getting stuck with a cheap boot.
This wasn't meant to be so much giving information about the editions but how to tell the difference between them - the real one's got white lettering, the cheap Zoke one's got red. The last paragraph was the point of the post ...
see the HK cover at the DDDhouse.com listing. see the Zoke cover at the koreandvds.com listing.
There's only one zoke culture version, It's made in Guangdong, not Hongkong. So called bootleg hongkong Zoke version is the mainland version. some site list it as no subtitle because it only has burn-in subtitle. some site list it with subtitle also because it has burn-in sub. Quality is poor, but it's not bootleg.