Pirates XXX WMV-HD-DVD

Pirates XXX - Cover

Foreword

When we reviewed Island Fever 3 at the beginning of last year, we wrote in the introduction:"What new fact shall I present to you...". Even though IF3 easily set itself apart from the masses of adult productions, it still followed the same simple scheme that they all do.

With Pirates XXX Joone shows us now, certainly to the surprise of a whole industry, that it's however possible different. He accomplished a movie, that, probably for the first time, successfully manages to deliver a believable mixture of both worlds. Although we still deal with an adult production, that notabene doesn't come too short with adult scenes, you could also say, Pirates XXX is a feature film with adult scenes.

This may be a big further step into the direction of merging both worlds. Will Joone one day produce a blockbuster in Hollywood, that will be shown in every movie theater?

Deluxe appearance - Inside ...

... as well as outside

Appearance

From packaging over introduction, actors and story, to special effects, everything is just right with this one. Pirates XXX is, without exaggeration, "The biggest adult production in history", as which it also gets marketed by Digital Playground.

Overall you'll get three DVDs after pulling and opening the noble paper slipcase. Firstly the two standard DVDs with the movie and "Special Features", and secondly of course the coveted WMV-HD-DVD. Just like the whole packaging these are high-quality prints and designs. You can see than on the images next to this paragraph.

Even the premiere at the Egyptian Theater, one of the most legendary movie theaters in the world, resembled a real Hollywood premiere. Besides the whole crew of Pirates XXX there were also singing pirates, fire-eaters, and everyone of distinction to come across. You find a whole bunch of images of the premiere at Luke is back: Pirates XXX Premiere At The Egyptian Theater

Pretty seemaids...

...pirates and...

...barmaids are waiting

Story

Equipped with a budget of more than one million Dollars and filmed at the coasts of California and Florida, Pirates XXX tells the story of curses, sword fights with skeleton warriors and of course the sexually thrilling life of pirates. Whether the latter happens on board of a ship, on the floor of an inn or a hostel, the locations and actors are always diversified.

The movie's story begins, as soem sailors' ship , who still entertained themselves right before, gets ambushed by pirates. She gets thrown overboard, he kidnapped and the ships inhibited from a chase by some canon shots. Luckily the overboarded gets picked up by some more noble sailors of both genders from another ship. After they learn about the happenings they start a chase. In a harbour it comes to a first encounter, where it, besides plenty of intercourse, also comes to a tried immolation of the kidnapped. Although he survives, the pirates find out about a mysterious island with an even more mysterious cave...

Just recently, on 7 January, Pirates XXX won eleven awards at the AVN Awards, some kind of oscar for adult entertainment. Among others for best HD production, best actors, best special effects, best music and best director.

For a XXX production...

...very appealing effects

Block creation
The codec didn't come along there

Video

While Island Fever 3 was a DVD-5 (Single layer), Pirates XXX comes on a DVD-9 (Double layer). Even if the "Behind the Scenes" video also needs some space, and Pirates XXX with over two hours has a much longer runtime than Island Fever 3, after all the bitrate of the video still increased to 7200Kb/s (Island Fever 3: 6500Kb/s).

Compared with the DVD-Version, there're barely any artefacts in the WMV-HD-DVD-Version. Especially with many fine details, the advantages of a more modern codec shows up noticeably. Yet there're some scenes that're obvious challenging for the codec, where blocking artifacts happen. (See image).

The question if the HD-Version makes sense, is naturally also decrepit with Pirates XXX. As our SD and HD comparison images on page two clearly show, compared to typical banal "Shaking films", in this case actors, scenery and costumes come in front of the HD lens, which simply just start to shine that way.

Audio

For Island Fever 3 we criticized that the sound of the WMV-HD-DVD existed only as stereo, although the normal DVD provided multi-channel audio. This time Pirates XXX also features six-channel-audio for the WMV-HD-DVD , just like the DVD.

Extras

There's only one extra on the WMV-HD-DVD, a "Behind the scenes"-video, which features some interesting insights into the production. We have some images of this in the Gallery.

Whereas on the Special-Features DVD you find extensive bonus material, which sadly is only available on the normal DVD.
Therefore this won't be covered here.

Finished, vanquished the bad, ...

... back to home. :-)

Enter Pirates XXX gallery

See our DVD / WMV-HD-DVD waggle images

DRM

Like with Island Fever 3 Digital Playground also waives any copy-protection for the WMV-HD-DVD of Pirates XXX, which would occur in the flavor of Microsoft's DRM. They also waive the region-code for both versions. The waiving of DRM is especially joyful for friends of other platforms like Mac and *nix, because with the right programs (e.g. Stoik Media-Converter) one can freely prepare the WMV-HD version, e.g. as XviD for Mac OS X or *nix, or however also for one's Palm, Pocket-PC, Playstation-Portable, or whatever one has at hand.

Unfortunately it has now become a very rare good to let the customer decide what he want to do with contents that he has legally acquired. So, Digital Playground is again to be praised for this.

According to Joone, 100,000 copies of Pirates XXX were sold untill November. Many adult-productions only manage to sell around 5,000 copies. How can a movie sell 20 times better, although it can be copied by everyone, while according to the thoughts of the mean (Hollywood) movie-industry, the bad customers mutate to pure copy-monsters, as soon as they don't get gagged and enslaved enough? How can it be, that a whole industry is that blinded? To the umpteenth time the adult-industry has demonstrated how to do it properly.

SD and HD comparison images - waggle images

This time we did frame accurate images for direct and precise comparison between the SD (DVD) and HD (WMV-HD-DVD) versions. Below there are eleven captures of the SD version. If you move your mouse over them, the HD version will be shown. If you click on them, the whole images will be shown, which will also change to the HD version if you move your mouse over them.