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

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...