DVD Zoning Challenged by UK Supermarket Chain

maroberts writes, "Britain's larget supermarket chain, Tesco, called on Warner Home Video to abandon zoning which inflates UK DVD prices, reports The Independent. Apparently sales of Tesco's stock DVD player [Wharefdale DVD-750] skyrocketed after the UK's hi-fi press explained how to make the unit region-free. " Looks like the UK is tired of overpaying for movies.

Comments

Re:Piracy prevention indeed.

[Ross C. Brackett]

I think I have an answer to your last question, "Why don't they learn their lesson and just sell us our movies in a sensible way?"

Maybe next time you should read the story all the way through. I think it's apparent by the third paragraph that the movie industry is truly concerned about the rights of the consumer:

...Tesco's world sourcing director, Christine Cross, wrote to Warren Liebefarb, the president of Warner Home Video, saying that zoning is an "unnecessary practice". Zoning uses technology to prevent DVDs bought in, say, the US from playing on machines sold in Europe.

Film studio executives have emphasized that zoning is designed only to minimize piracy, and not to cheat customers in foreign markets. When accused in a recent Associated Press interview that region-coded DVDs impaired fair trade and worked against foreign consumer's best interests, Warner Brothers CEO Jamie Kellner was quick to deny the charges. "Absolutely not," Kellner told AP reporter Daniel Stewart during the interview which took place at Kellner's Beverly Hills mansion. "The thought that the movie industry would attempt to extort overseas customers through unfair pricing practices is simply appalling to me," Kellner continued, popping open a bottle of Champaign and proceeding to roll around in a pile of thousand dollar bills. "The movie industry is about the creation of art. I, and those in my industry who work to entertain the peoples of the world are simply artists. Nothing more and nothing less," Kellner said, as a servant spoon-fed him Caviar from a crystal platter in the backseat of his stretch limousine. "It's like they say, art is what makes the world go 'round," Kellner said.

I hope this silences anyone who would accuse the movie industry of any less-than-noble intentions.

My friend's $150 DVD player

[VValdo]

is called the RAITE AVPhile 715. His GF bought it for about $150 from Frys Electronics. Not only does it play DVDs, but also CDs, VCDs, and MP3s (ISO formatted). I think it's manufactured somewhere in Europe.

*AND* we learned on the net that you can shut off region codes & Macrovision with certain sequences on the remote control.

I found this too while looking for something else: http://www2.datatestlab.com/regionhacks/ - it seems to have info for circumventing regions on multiple players.

thought someone might be interested,
W
-------------------

When will the lawsuit be filed?

[TrentC]

I expect that, since someone in the UK press has published information on how to circumvent controls on accessing copyrighted material, that the MPAA will file a lawsuit (or they will find someone in the UK willing to file on their behalf) posthaste.

I mean, if a couple of "evil hackers" in Norway can't write a program to get around CSS, then why should "the hi-fi press" (?) in the UK be able to publish information on how to hack the units themselves?

And isn't it interesting that the ones that can be set to play any region discs have skyrocketed in popularity? Now, would that be because people (the people in Britian, anyways) value the freedom that OpenDVD, the EFF and others are championing on our behalf? Or is the MPAA and their apologists going to try to claim that the owners of these DVD players are all pirates?

Jay (=

Open markets make better markets

[nlh]

"Film studios say zoning is designed to minimise piracy"

Yeah....just like DeCSS is designed to maximize piracy. Sure.

I'm a firm believer in allowing market forces to dictate the state of the market. DVD zoning is not a piracy prevention tool. It's an electronic measure for specifying market barriers - barriers which, in this age, should not be defined by artifical means. If I want to watch an imported Japanese porn flick on my plain-vanilla Pioneer DVD player, I should have every right to. If I want to watch a classic French film brought here from Europe, the same goes. Having a zoning system in place restricts perfectly legitimate uses of the DVD system and allows orchestrated price controls (like those that Tesco is fighting against) to exist.

Now, granted, I am not a professional economist and can't speak for trade barriers, import restrictions, tariffs, etc. But the whole point of economic measures like those is allow the market to dictate the price of goods. If a Euro-zone DVD costs more to import because of a set tariff, then fine! If I'm willing to pay the price then I should at least have the ability to view the film. If UK DVDs are being priced artificially high, however, that's allowing the industry to leverage monopolistic price controls (i.e. zoning) and shouldn't continue.

"Here here" to Tesco.

Piracy prevention indeed.

[Duke of URL]

"Film studios say zoning is designed to minimise piracy. But Ms Cross said it was 'against the spirit of free competition and a potential trade barrier. We'll fight so the prices come down.'"

I have to agree with Cross. The regional codes are more about protecting their "right" to profit gouge rather than to prevent piracy.

We can defeat their regional codes.
We can defeat their weak encryption schemes.

Why don't they learn their lesson and just sell us our movies in a sensible way?

Get your region-free player right here in the U.S.

[Overfiend]

...without having to do any hardware mods to the player (there are geeks who fear hardware). :)

Slashdot covered this a while back, but what you want is the Apex AD-600A. You can get it at Circuit City for between $150 and $190 (CC has been playing with the price in different parts of the country, a "region-coding" of their own, I guess -- Circuit City can't be all good, now, they've got that DiVX legacy of evil to keep up with).

CC doesn't keep them on the shelves, but just have the sales droid punch in "APX AD-600A" into his terminal if he doesn't know what you're talking about.

When /. covered this product it was mainly over its ability to play MP3's. I don't personally care too much about that, but here's what I do like:

• plays CD-R's and CD-RW's (many DVD players can't play CD-R's because of their different optical characteristics
• you can assign yourself to any region, including bypass (region 0, which basically means you can only play discs without region protection) from the easter egg "loopholes" menu
• you can turn off Macrovision from that same menu -- useful even for people who don't want to copy movies, as it enables you to daisy-chain the DVD player through your VCR to the TV. This can be necessary if you've got a paucity of AV jacks on the set or if you've already filled them up with other crap.
• Zoom. Some player manufacturers put this only on higher-end models; I have no idea why. To create a product ghetto, I suppose. Once nice thing is that the Apex (apparently, I haven't been able to verify this personally) will use 16x9 enhancement information for a sharper zoom even on a lousy 4x3 television. A thoughtful touch. I couldn't find a way to pan the zoom window, though.
• The price. Though it was offset by a bit since I had to buy some decent cables (see below), my net expenditure *still* came out well below what I would have paid for a "comparable" player, which actually would have been missing several features the Apex has.

The disadvantages, in my opinion:

• No optical outputs. Oh well.
• No 5.1 outputs, either. The best route to go for high-end sound is an external decoder for AC-3 or DTS, anyway -- this player just makes it mandatory. (Yes, like every other civilized DVD player you can send the raw digital data bitstream out through an RCA jack.)
• No jog shuttle.
• Forward and reverse on audio CD's is a bit weird. You get an Alvin and the chipmunks effect, and if you move too fast, it can just plain get stuck -- you have to stop and restart.
• As others have noted, the menu interface to MP3 CD's leaves a bit to be desired (8.3 filenames only, poor directory navigation).
• Changing state between two different playback modes is often a bit dodgy. For instance, there is an "Enter/Play" button in the middle of the menu arrows, in addition to a "Play/Pause" button at the bottom of the remote. Sometimes, only one of those will do what you want. Also, in many cases you can't go straight from, say, "Step" (forward frame-by-frame) to fast-forward. You have to go back to "Play" first.
• Ships with a set of really marginal cables. Buy a set of good cables to go with it.

Anyway, many of the above ergonomic limitations could be overcome by revisions to the firmware, I'm sure. And there seems to be enough of a hacker community around this player that people might just end up hacking the firmware (you'd have to buy an EEPROM replacement for the existing firmware chip, though -- while socketed for easy replacement, it is not reprogrammable). I wonder if Apex is nuts enough to open-source their firmware and turn the geeks loose on it?

Oh yeah, how to get to the loopholes menu: without a disc in the player, "SETUP" -> select the preferences item -> "STEP" -> chapter/track back "|<<" -> chapter/track forward ">>|". Have fun...