I have seen two versions of Escaflowne released on DVD in the USA;

1: 8 discs, plus an action figure, Region 1 encoding with English soundtrack only.

2: 3 disc import, English and Japanese with option English subtitles, supposedly plays on all DVD players.

I don't want to get ripped off, so I am asking: which of these are better to buy? I play most of my DVDs on my computer, which has Divx and Windows Media Player.

My little brother got the 8 DVD set with Box sans figure from RightStuf.com for about $85 on sale about a month and a half ago. He said that the quality was great and they played fine.

The 3 disc is most likely a bootleg version. I'm not aware of any 3 disc legit version. MOST of the time, you can tell an anime bootleg if it is region 0 (all region) or has chinese subtitles in edition to the english subtitles. That being said, I wouldn't recommend buying a 26 episode series on 3 dvds. That would be 8 or 9 episodes per dvd. Most likely the video quality would be suboptimal.

I have the US released 8 disc version and like it very much. Don't support bootlegs and get the US version.

Hope that helps.
Michael

It definitely is a bootleg, fiver is right about everything he said.

The first one actually has Japanese audio too.

If you're not hell-bent on getting the box and the figurine, it would probably be cheaper to pick up the individual discs. They run $11 each on buy.com and seem to be eligible for their "buy 4, get 1 free" deal.

Definitely get the 8-disc box set. As has been said already (several times, but what the hell ), it's legitimate and includes both the dubbed AND subtitled versions.

I own it and and love it. It's an excellent series.

I bought the LE box set verion (8-disc box, numbered + action figure) when it came out. It's a great set. It has both original Japanese audio as well as an excellent English dub.

Definitely get the 8-disc version from Bandai. Especially it is now much cheaper to buy the discs individually after a recent price drop. Don't fall for the 3-discer bootleg. Support the local anime distributors so that they can afford to bring us more good animes from Japan

Definitely got the 3 disc version by accident... but definitely like it. I've compared video and audio quality to the other version and it's the same, only $60 cheaper.

700+ minutes of video on 3 discs?! They better be DVD-9!