DVDs

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DVDs are currently available of the first season of "CHiPs".

Official DVD release

It was announced in February 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 is likely that season 2 will be available in the summer of 2008, but there is no official release date as of January 8, 2008.

Retailer link

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.

Empirical

298 3.jpg

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.


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.


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!