DVDs

Season 1 DVD box cover art

DVDs are currently available of the first season of "CHiPs". Season 2 is due out June 3, 2008.

Official DVD release

It was announced on February 7, 2007 that a DVD box set of the first season of "CHiPs" would be made available June 5, 2007. The DVDs are official products from Warner Bros.. "CHiPs": The Complete First Season DVDs include all 22 episodes of season one with introductions by Erik Estrada on select episodes and a CHiPs: The Ride Out of Spanish Harlem featurette.

Other seasons will follow, but a complete release schedule has not been announced. It has been confirmed that season 2 will be available on June 3, 2008.[1]

Retailer link

• "CHiPs": The Complete First Season DVDs on Amazon.com

Bootlegs

Due to the previous lack of official DVDs, there have been numerous bootleg DVDs (in some cases, all over the world). Such bootlegs can have issues with disc and picture quality.

Bootleg DVDs often show up on eBay and elsewhere. Fans are cautioned that these are illegal! The footage on the DVDs was likely recorded off TV and is undoubtedly low quality. Fans are urged not to buy these.

TV Show Monster

A web site is selling 22 DVDs of all six seasons for $59.95. For features, they list:

• Excellent video and audio quality
• 100% in chronological order
• Commercial free and unedited
• This box set contains all 22 DVDs with Custom Artwork.
• These DVDs are region free so they will play on any DVD player Worldwide and DVD-Rom, X-Box or PS2 worldwide.
• Presented in English

The fact they are region-free is a big clue to these being bootlegs, not to mention the lame DVD cover art.

Empirical

One DVD set that has shown up multiple times is sold by a company called Empirical (or Empirical Film). The company sells DVD sets of many television shows, many of which are already legally available on DVD. The company is based in the Philippines, making it difficult for license holders to shut them down.

Clues that this is a bootleg are:

• No copyright information on the DVD cover
• Not available at trusted retailers such as Amazon.com
• Strange 2/2/4/4/4 episode count per disc
• Episodes out of order...and hardly a "best of" set
• Inclusion of the E! True Hollywood Story as one of the episodes
• Use of the word "disk" rather than "disc" to refer to the DVDs
• Region-free

Unfortunately, the text description is too small to read, but it was likely taken from CHiPs Online.

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TV Addicts

Another set of bootleg DVDs

Cover art for these bootlegs

Although the producers of this DVD set aren't named (which in itself is a clue they're bootlegs), they were found on a site called "TV Addicts", so that's the name that fans have used to referred to this set. They claim to have 139 episodes on 15 DVD-R discs. (That's about nine hours per disc, so the quality must be terrible!)

Clues that these DVDs are bootlegs are:

• No copyright information on the DVD cover
• Not available at trusted retailers such as Amazon.com
• Very amateur package design
• Region-free
• DVD-R format, not even regular DVD format

Unfortunately, the text description is too small to read, but it was likely taken from CHiPs Online.

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CHiPs '99 VCD

Front of VCD

Back of VCD

This may look like a legitimate Philippine release of CHiPs '99 on VideoCD by Warner Bros., but it is not. The bootleggers have apparently just taken the VHS release, copied information from the box, and put it on a VideoCD. Please note that this is not a DVD and VideoCD quality is very poor.

Clues that this VCD is a bootleg are:

• It's a VideoCD
• The UPC code is not listed as belonging to Warner Bros. It's not listed anywhere!