How to Find Mandarin DVDs or Blu-Ray Outside Asia
A simple trick to find DVDs or Blu-ray with Mandarin audio outside Asia (and if desired with English or Chinese subtitles).
If you live outside Asia and want to watch movies in Mandarin, it can be very difficult to find DVDs or Blu-rays with Mandarin audio. The real Mandarin DVDs are usually only sold within Chinese speaking regions due to the region lock of many DVDs and Blu-rays.
But there are quite a few DVDs and Blu-rays films out there with English as their main language and Mandarin as an alternative. Many of them have English or Simplified Chinese subtitles.
Unfortunately, many big online stores do not have a search tool that supports searching for the available languages of a DVD. If one searches, for example, for Batman Mandarin then all DVDs that have Mandarin subtitles will show up and most of them do not have Mandarin audio.
Even worse, many shops will not consider the product details and nothing will show up, as there are no DVDs with both "Batman" and "Mandarin" in the title. As of current (August 27, 2020) amazon.com shows X-Men as the best search result for Batman Mandarin.
The solution is the following: almost always in the product description in online stores, the Mandarin language audio is written as follows:
- Mandarin DD 5.1
- Mandarin Dolby Digital 5.1
But we still need another piece: Google permits to limit the search to a specific domain by using the "site:" argument. For example, if the store of your choice is amazon.com, then a search site:amazon.com on google.com will only show result on the domain amazon.com.
Putting the two pieces together, if we want to search for movies with Mandarin audio on amazon.com, we use google.com and search for
and Google will list us the matching DVDs.
Then switch to the image search and look through the DVD covers until you find one you like.
If you are looking for a specific movie, e.g. Batman, then try Batman "Mandarin DD" site:amazon.com
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