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Time Warner To Change DVD Region Coding System?
cyber-vandal writes: "I've been playing with livid for a few months now, and someone posted a rather disturbing message on the mailing list. Apparently Time Warner are making changes to the region encoding system to stop multi-region dvd players working properly. The link can be found here. I'm hoping it's just the MPAA putting out FUD to discourage people from buying them, can anyone confirm or deny this?" I've tried reaching Time-Warner, and haven't gotten a reply - anyone else heard anything?
I keep on asking myself this very same question. All the time. It's obvious that the file format thing was to introduce backward incompatibilities. When are people going to get tired of buying the same software over and over and over????? That's one of my main reasons I'm getting to linux, and only hope that easy distros happen soon so I can get my mom on it.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The next time I'll buy something from then is when the sheriff is auctioning off the furniture at the bankruptcy sale.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Or just be made here for personal use (or, in the case of software, distribution by means of such things as Freenet) by people who don't give a f*ck about the DMCA.
Whereas, "compliant" players would pass:
In other words, a false challenge would be issued first. Fully region free players would fail this every time, while the "approved" players would work fine.
I asked:
What is the equivalent method for imparting a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?
Nobody replied to that at all. It should be pretty obvious that what applies to a pest in the neighbourhood doesn't apply to a multinational -- the power balance is utterly different.
But the question remains. How do you impart a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Respect is due. But still, we should be clear about this - threatening to ignore the DMCA, or indeeed threatening to kill the CEO of Time Warner _isn't_ illegal to a hell of a lot of posters on slashdot. Basically, if you're human rights laws let corporations get past them that quickly, they're not worth the paper they're written on, so civil disobedience is the answer. -- Tim Fisken
The goodwill of those folks? We're talking about someone who while on a trip in say the US found a copy of a movie on the shelf for significantly cheaper than there country. Or maybe one they aren't even able to buy there. Why is it piracy to then buy that film anywhere but in your home country? Is it pirarcy to go to France, buy a movie, and then return home?
I really doubt that all Region 1 DVDs are available in all 6 regions.
treke
Surely the stockholders support the actions of the studios, since they lead to greater profits? I don't see how one could convince them of the merits of social responsibility, since they're in it for the money.
Anyway, stockholders only vote by buying or selling stock. Selling doesn't convey a message that is specific enough, ie. it won't tell the studios that regional coding is wrong.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I've been tring to verify this "fact" for over a year. The facts are that most places sell region 4/Pal and most places will sell region free players as well.
I think it may be illegal to not offer a region free unit but isn't illegal to offer region coded ones as well.
If anyone has some facts on this I would like to hear it.
hoops to make a DVD work. The hole thing is stinky anyway. That's why I'm holding out on DVD. I'll stick with tape. Unfortunately they're probably will be a day that I'll need to upgrade. One can only hope that the citzenry can take action against all bastards involved..
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Hee, hee! Nothing ever is going to make DVDs hard
to get in the US (the rest of America is a different issue). The US is the Big Consumer
Market.
Region coding provides nothing more than the
ability to _restrict_ who gets what and when. It's
a restrictive technology, and if it gets bypassed,
it bypasses arbitrary (or more specifically,
marketing-based) restrictions.
There's NOTHING (nothing, nothing, nothing!!!) in
region codes that helps the consumer, or anyone
at all except for the company's bankroll.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Good thing stuff like this never gets taken out of context or misinterpreted or anything. Otherwise people might try to marginalize our points of view on issues like this by painting us as knee-jerk extremists with immature worldviews.
That would be bad. Good thing it never happens.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
With the Apex dvd player you can either turn off the region code or change it. I have a DVD movie that is about 1 year old and it would not play with region codes off, so i just switched it :-)
An old web page of mine http://www.10-10-info.com/apex/
I like to build things and wire stuff together.
Just buy any home cinema magazine, and you'll find the adverts full of region-free players.
It's only the major brand-tied houses that don't sell them, precisely because they are brand-tied and therefore not free agents. Wherever the free market is allowed to operate, region-free players abound.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Then, one day, I decided to buy Dino Crisis (the American version, no less). I stuck the disk in my PSX, and I got some Japanese text, which I assume said, "How dare you try to play our disk in your region free player, stupid consumer-drone!" inside a "not" sign (a circle with a slash through it, like the Ghostbusters symbol or a No Smoking sign.)
At that point I mostly stopped buying PS games, and I'm only planning on buying one more (Lunar: Eternal Blue it has sentimental value from my SegaCD days, and my /. user ID was taken from it). I'll also never buy any more Sony products, or any encrypted DVDs, period.
My advice to everyone in my family was to just not buy a DVD player. (I will certainly never own such a thing myself, under any concievable circumstances.) They completely ignored me and dismissed me as a crackpot (which is what they do with most of my crusades) and bought a DVD player anyway. They conceeded many of my points, but they figure that if legal DVD stuff becomes a problem, they'll be able to find illegal DVD stuff on the black market. (Amazingly enough they are probably right, I know three people who can get black market goods myself, mostly from them bragging about it.)
I think the best way to avoid falling into the trap of giving money to Sony, AOL/Time/Warner, and the rest of the MPAA/RIAA racketeers is to not buy their players. If I had known when I bought my Playstation what I know now about Sony, I would never have bought their game console in the first place, and wouldn't have so many PSX games. (Darn it, I've always been one of these fools who legally purchases copies of games! If I were crooked, I could have just got my friend to sell me cheap CD-R versions. I guess the old saying is true, "Never give a sucker an even break!" But then I'm still living in a dream world where game designers are decent guys like Mark Blank or Dan Bunten, not evil multinationals like Sony.)
Boycott's don't work, or at least I'd like to know one case where a boycott has actually worked against a multinational (the ones from the Christian Right don't count, they succeed sometimes because of intimidation and scare tactics, not purely because the member of the AFA aren't going to buy a product. i.e. Take the show off or the FCC will get you, etc..) But at least if I opt out of a corrupt system, I don't have to feel like I'm getting screwed over. Incidentally, in an interview in a new issue of PC Gamer, a game designer sounded pretty upset about a deal he made with Sony. He basically ended by saying, "But it's Sony, what can you do, expect bend over and like it." That sentiment can pretty much be aimed at all multinationals, like AOL/Time/Warner. However, they still haven't enacted laws to force us to buy their infernal gadgets, so we can still decide not to live under their laws.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Well, I guess most people not living in zone 1 do. I mean, why wait for a year extra to get the movie when you can get the same movie, sans the subtitles right away?! Oh, and many zone 1 residents import movies from other zones. Think Hong Kong action, Manga, etc.
A product that has no consumer benefit must fail. I apologise for using "wisdom" and "Movie company" in the same sentence.
Wear your Down-with-DVD-CCA t-shirt when you visit the store. Explain to anyone who will listen that your t-shirt is illegal ... and why.
Some "innocent bystanders" are likely to get burned.
Simple answer. Go buy PLENTY of discs. Next day, return them all saying you got some sort of wierd problem when you tried to play them. Make the process as time consuming as possable for the video place ('forget' your reciept etc). Make sure it's a place that allows returns rather than store credit. Be sure to try several new copies of the disks (several in one day if time permits) and refuse to give up. Be sure to point out that plays just fine, so it can't be the player. With persistance, they might even pay you to go away!
Make sure that the discs you do that for are actually using the new coding method, ideally with an actual region free player.
It's called civil disobediance, huh?
:-(
If we all followed the law because not following it is always wrong, we'd still be part of Great Britain.
Laws that are bad for society at large, IMO, should be broken. The hard part is finding people with enough courage to do it.
P.S. I think I just got trolled
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
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first one to go has to be Case! Who's with me?
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Currency conversions are automatic when buying on a credit or debit card.
That's why dozens of thousands of Brits are buying DVDs over the Internet from places outside of their native Region 2 (mainly the US) without having to think at all about the currency. I bet VISA are making a killing on the conversions, but good luck to them -- they're facilitating our freedom.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
A variation on your idea:
Go to your local MegaHollyBuster and rent one of these Time Warner disks. Bring it back and bitch up a storm about it not playing; play dumb; demand a free rental. Grab another T/W disk. Come back in screaming bloody murder about their shitty disks until you get an answer that you "understand". Yell and rant some more, almost to the point of being kicked out of the store.
I guarantee it won't take very many of these episodes before they dump this dumb idea.
I think the big international media companies are much more worried about Region 1 films reaching other regions of the world prior to their offiial release.
For what it's worth, I play DVDs -- and video cassettes -- produced and distributed in Hungary, and elsewhere in Europe, all the time, with no trouble. I have a dedicated Win98 box attached to my multisystem (NTSC/PAL/SECAM) TV. With Remote Selector I've never had trouble playing Hungarian and other Region 2 discs on my nominally Region 1 DVD-ROM drive. (They do come out in PAL though I'm not aware of any reason why the player couldn't show them in NTSC).
I think region coding is basically a waste of time on the part of DVD manufacturers; eventually it will be dropped entirely. I'm looking forward to that day...
Kiscica
Does it feel good to sit in a chair and type threats to a company that will never see them? With all thier money, they could make you disappear off of the face of the planet, and nobody would notice.
Oh well, looks like its back to DeCSS for me. Or sticking to good old-fashioned VHS.... or ignoring this stupid culture and sticking to video games anyways.
Before you go saying you can change your region, realize that most players that allow this only allow you to do it a *limited* number of times. The way this is supposed to work is that you, the consumer, are only allowed to change the region of a DVD player five (5) times on your own. If you need to change the region again, you have to send your DVD drive back to the manufacturer to have this count reset. They only can reset the counter five times as well. This gives you a grand total of 25 times you are allowed to change the region of any given DVD player.
Many manufacturers simply don't tell the public how to change their region code. These allow 25 region changes using whatever key sequence/method is required to do it, since it is assumed that only the manufacturer knows the sequence.
So before you go saying you can just change your player's region, relize that most of us can't keep switching our players from region to region. Many of us are not technically literate enough to do the work required to bypass a counter. Future designs likely will not let you bypass these counters, and do encryption & Macrovision(tm) on the same chip.
My concern with region codes is for works that are not released in a particular region. I already import Music CDs from other countries I can not get in my own. If DVD-Audio discs have the region code system that DVDs presently have, I will need to have a player for *each region* I import music from, as well as my own.
Sorry. While you many not inconvinience 99% of your purchasers, there are the 1% of us that are MAJORLY inconvienced by region codes.
I recommend not making random death threats; they might be taken seriously:
Aug. 31, 2000 | No one ever expected Sean Dix -- the gently gruff, hardworking New York kid turned quirky inventor -- to wind up in jail this summer, especially not for sending a death threat to one of the world's most powerful men.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
What did you write? The reason I ask is that generally they probably aren't going to take action after a single complaint, but might with a few. It would be helpful if everyone made the same points.
I'm too lazy to walk around computer and hi-fi stores asking "killer question" and hoping that this would work. I have a simpler way around this whole bad idea.
I simply don't have a DVD player and I don't plan to buy one. So I don't have and don't rent any DVD movies. I stick with my VCR and traditional cassettes when I really have to watch something (and come on, the difference is not worth all the trouble). And going to the movies instead of sitting in front of a computer has some other, added benefits.
And I hope that some day another medium would appear that would not require me to go through an in-depth study (finding suitable player, finding suitable software I could use on Linux etc.etc.) just to use.
In the words of Cake:
Yeah, excess ain't rebellion. You're drinking what they're selling.
This isnt proving anything. DONT BUY DVD PLAYERS! If the social ramifications of the MPAA's activities offend you, dont buy ANY of their products, regardless of the capabilities. Do you think they make any less money off of a region free player? Nope. Watch VHS. Or, read a book. But dont waste your time searching for an illegal product to watch trite movies on overpriced media.
If people can hack :Cue:Cats and figure out how to scan without sending out the serial #, it should be possible to hack a DVD player and trick the player into playing any DVD disc. There must be some program burned into a ROM chip that does the region checking. It's only a matter of figuring out how to do it.
There is absolutely nothing that prohibits someone in Europe to get a cheap zone 1 DVD player in the US that can output NTSC on PAL40 and then use that player in Europe to view zone 1 DVDs. This is actually a cheap alternative. If you have a relatively modern TV which can display NTSC, then any zone 1 player would work. You would only need a cheap power converter which cost about 10$ in Radio Shack. I heard that Warner wanter to outlaw the sale of such power convertors so you might have to hurry and go buy one (Just kidding! :-) ).
Also, this new zone protection looks to me like it is similar to the old Disney protection which tricked multi-zone players by not asking them if they were zone 1, but say zone 2 after which the dvd software would in essense declare "too bad we wanted a zone 1". How is this new scheme any different? Multi-zone DVDs are, I think, a bad idea because you can write software that detect if a player can view more than one zone, but a player which can be set to any single zone at a time can probably not be sniffed by the dvd software anyway, right?
The American Constitution doesn't contain laws. The American Constitution provides guidelines for the governments. Federal laws are called Federal Statues.
Regional price discrimination wouldn't work, and it doesn't really happen anyway. DVDs tend to be about the same price in different countries. (With the exception of those damn Lexx DVDs, that I had to order from Canada. Grumble.)
MSK
That was a pretty lame comment ... most countrys' money will work in most other countries. You just need a big company that likes different kinds of money (ooh, a bank ;-).
... we just don't give as good of an exchange rate as they could get back home. :-)
I'm Canadian, and we accept Canadian and American money everywhere
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
No, wrong again. "circumvent" means "to go around" rather than "to blow wind around".
Having said that; I do have a DVD player that changes region manually. So I feel in no danger, so far.
"You're welcome to try and find a legal DVD player without region coding and Macrovision protection." was his last comment before I left the store.
The problem is, you sounded too knowledgable. Act like you don't know much about DVD. "This friend of mine said that some DVD players won't take Japanese discs. This one isn't like that is it?" (Bonus points for a wide eyed I ain't never seen no city before bumpkin impresion). Make it clear that as far as you're concerned any player like that is just shoddy merchandise and they should be ashamed of themselves for selling such junk.
On the subject of sub-titles, why not have all of the different language sub-titles available for all region encodings and allow the viewer to choose which, if any, sub-titles to watch?
That's a dumb comment, not an insightful one. If "Joe Public" buys his DVDs at the same store he bought the player, then chances are damn good that both the player and the DVDs are going to have the same region code. "Joe Public" will never know why people are making such a fuss about this.
i bought a dvd player because i want the high quality picture and sound, as well as the lack of deterioration if i ever have kids, i want them to be able to watch my Monty Python dvds
i bought a zone-free dvd player, at a much higher cost than a code compliant player, because i am a big fan of anime. currently, i own almost the entire rurouni kenshin series and the ova's on import dvd. it is expensive, but well worth it to me. however, import anime is not the only thing i watch on my dvd player. i have perfectly legal copies of many american releases as well, and certainly have no intention of pirating anything
i have reason to believe that this new measure may very well affect my particular dvd player, and make future dvd releases un-playable.
i bought my dvd player well before the DeCSS controversy began, but ever since, my hatred of the MPAA has been growing exponentially. i actually have an anti-MPAA bumper sticker on my car i don't want to support such a restricted standard, but right now, it is the only way to get the level of quality i want.
as it stands, my choices are to be a hypocrite, but be able to watch movies with an extremely clear picture and dolby surround which will not deteriorate over the years, or to make due with a vastly inferior standard which does not carry the same restrictions.
either way, i, a consumer, lose.
ideally businesses succeed because they fill a need in such a way as to benefit the consumer. instead, they have given me quite a dilemma. if it weren't for corporate greed and paranoia, this could easily be avoided.
because of many of the same kinds of issues, i do not and will not own any M$ software. but in this case, there are multiple alternatives. with linux and freeBSD, i can do anything i might have needed windows for, and more, without all the restrictions imposed by monopolistic corporate greed.
in the case of dvd's, though, there is no alternative that adequately fulfills my requirements, and i don't see that changing the parties that make up the MPAA have a stranglehold on the mainstream motion picture industry. it really makes me feel that i have no choice no other options. i predict that most people in this situation will continue to buy dvd's, but keep a deep resentment for those who have forced them into supporting a standard that strictly limits their own freedom of choice.
if my requirements for sound and picture quality are to be fulfilled, i have no choice except the choice to not have those requirements fulfilled at all. does that make sense?
i really resent that.
When books burn, people are next.
Whenever I look at the situation today, I think of Omni Consumer Products in the movie Robocop. To quote Clarence Bodakker when he was trying to stop Robocop from beating him to death, "I work for Dick Jones. Dick Jones is OCP. OCP runs the cops, you're a cop."
The cops basically do work for OCP nowadays, and not for the people. They aren't protecting or serving anyone but their corporate masters in matters like these. Every year, the corruption destroying the United States government spreads like a cancer, but the people remain complacent.
Plenty of other countries have complacent populations in the face of government corruption, in fact many countries are far more opressed by their governments than United States citizens are. But the massive corruption in the US government is dangerous because the US is a powerful country with a large standing army. If the US is a defacto "world's policeman," feeling that it has the right to use its troops whenever it feels it is morally justifiable, what can the rest of that world do if that policeman is corrupt?
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
No it isn't. Companies have differnt price levels for different market segments all the time. Look at CPUs. Intel and AMD have one price list for top level purchasers (your Compaqs and IBMs and such), another for integrators and another for their channel distributors.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Federal laws are called Federal Statues.
Yes, I inspected quite a few of those Federal Statues when I was down in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Almost all of them had clothes on, but they did look quite a bit more heroic than the live politicians walking by.
Why is it piracy to then buy that film anywhere but in your home country? Is it pirarcy to go to France, buy a movie, and then return home?
speaking of which, I did exactly that this summer. I now own a pristine copy of cyrano de bergerac (wonderful movie, not avalible in anything but region 2, and horrible in any translation) which I cannot watch. I did know this before I went, but I knew I'd regret it forever if I didn't get it. so now what? rip to VCD? never watch it? them's my options. the whole region-coding thing is a real problem for anyone who isn't even trying to "pirate" (by their definition) but simply is bilingual and enjoys movies from multiple countries.
Lea
It prevents circumventing copy protection mechanisims... this is not a copy protection mechanism so.... it should be perfectly fine
You Like Science?
You Like Science?
You Like bottomquark.
When buying DVD players here the first thing you ask the salesman is if the player is multi-zoned. The answer is invariably yes.
I buy all my DVD's from Amazon because they have a much wider range than any of the local stores and I can get the movies I want much sooner (in many cases before they hit the local circuit). My DVD player is hacked to report its region 1 to get past those icky disks from universal.
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I'd install FreeBSD before I'd install Linux.
Disney has been doing this for quite some time now. A player set to Region 0 has problems, but if you can set your player to any region, it works just fine.
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
For me this region-encoding-stuff is a very big issue, because DVD's are sort of a hobby for me.
I like many slightly older movies and live in region 2, where very few movies are released that are not the latest and greatest "Leornardo DiPaprica" movie for the masses. So several of my DVD's are region 1, because they simply do not exist in region 2.
There are singles. They are wildly popular in Japan, and I have a good amount of them. Next non-sense, please.
(8-DCS)
I have serious doubts about all this stuff... the DVD is supposed to not hold any executable - basically just some raw CSS-encoded MPEG2 streams and a bunch of infos like "if button DOWN is pressed, highligh text #2 in menu". Not quite something that could intelligently probe the player and decide for itself to play or not.
I quite don't see how a DVD could query a DVD player to check the region. It seems to me things work the other way around : the player checks if his region coding is compatible with the value written on the disc and decides what to do from there on. All the logic and thinking is done by the player CPU and code in its ROM.
Besides, the 2 first titles supposed to have this RCE "feature", namely "The patriot" and "The Perfect Storm" are not even worth the plastic they are recorded on. ("The patriot" is an history rewrite, made so that every (usually totally ignorant about history) US spectator think he is from the "best country in the world" (TM) and that every English soldier was a Nazi.)
No Pun Intended, right?
Your point would be valid, except DVDs don't have embedded CPUs in them, and therefor are nothing else than passive storage medias that only hold passive content (no executables)
I'd definite answer him this way...
"What? You need an illegal player to play all my Japanese DVDs? Then I'd rather go illegal", and leave.
What this clearly show to the sales is that "legal" is NOT the thing that customers WANT. They WANT functionality. They CARE freedom. Legistration simply WON'T work. And we let them propagate this message up.
Ok,
but what if it tries the incorrect region first. Then the player will lock into that region, and so the will not pass the second test. And since this is in software, so discs can be set to check your way, and some to check my way.
As much as people in general may be bad with technology, they also hate things flashing at them. That's why ns's <blink> tag was so maligned.
Care about freedom?
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Wouldn't that only apply to sales within the U.S.? Our laws don't apply to markets that aren't 'ours'.
So, a company can't have artificial pricing zones within the U.S., but if the company prices things different for Japan than for Germany than for U.S., that isn't our problem.
Plus, it gets even more complicated when you consider import/export tariffs, certifications (e.g. CE), and trade agreements requiring min/max import/export levels on certain products.
More basically, as others have said, it's to protect the investment in the product. This is to prevent, say, an american film from being sold in the European market until it has been suitably modified (dubbed, re-edited for local decency laws, import regs, etc.)
Is this a good thing? I don't know. But I can see why it's done and why US anti-trust laws aren't wholly relevant.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
I can imagine a smartass DVD player talks to a not-that-stupid-either disc:
:) The dvd player just wanted to see that anime piece, you know :)
Player: Yo, man, show me what you've got in there...
Disc: Dude, you look pretty ugly.. You look like... like... like you are from Japan or something
Player (quickly taking off samurai disguise): What ? What is that jyapen anyway ? How do you spell that ?
Disc: Hold on right there ! I've seen you taking that japanese thing off ! I know you...
Player (hiding his little penguin statue): You better play that movie, bro..
Disc: No movie for you, you pirate-hacker-linux-based-penguin-powered-bastard ! I'm not even talking to you anymore !
Message on the screen: "Disc was rejected due to a region conflict. Talk to your local distributor."
P.S. No offence against Japan
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On scale from -14 to 56 this post is '-15, Nonexistent'
As a zone 1 resident (Florida, USA), I can say that all of my friends who have any interest in movies have bought regionless DVD players. Mostly Pioneer models.
Most people want to view Anime, however there are significant European releases that never make it over here on DVD, like Lexx (available in Germany, but not in the US), which many drives many people nuts (both fans of Lexx, and fans of Tim Curry/Barry Bostwick/Rocky Horror).
This is likely to continue. The "correct" ending of Armies of Darkness, and Disney's "Black Cauldron" were just recently were released in the US, but have been available in Europe. I believe (ianame) that Disney's "Song of the South" is still only available in Europe.
BTW - Manga are comic books - I like Battle Angel, 2001, A,A', and anything by Masume Shirow, while my girlfriend likes Secret Plot, Bondage Fairies, and anything Hentai. Unlikely that you'll read any of it in a DVD player. Not to be confused with the company that puts out Anime whose name is "Manga Video".
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I haven't paid much attention to the details of standalone DVD players as I'm perfectly happy with the playback on my DVD-ROM to a 21" monitor. Plus I've been more concerned with the erosion of my legal/constitutional rights by the MPAA/RIAA/DCMA etc. BUT, the wife wants one for our tv (I think I've seen it in the house somewhere, don't watch tv much :) and is asking me, the resident computer geek to find a good deal.
Lurking through the discussions I was made aware that there are region "issues" I need to take into consideration and someone posted a comment for feedback of region-free players (yes, I know the technical details just never cared to research more til now). Never really thought about the player capabilities really but yeah, I want one region-free or, like the Panasonic 909, one that can emulate whatever region is needed by the disc at the time. Time Warner needs to get its ass out of my life and stop making things difficult for me, a non-pirate, to watch friggin "The Iron Giant" 6 billion times to placate the kids.
That all said, anyone care to shed some light on what are some of the better models? If I can find one with a built-in VCR that ignores Macrovision so I can make copies direct on the appliance itself that would be sweeeeet. I refuse to let
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
Persoanlly I would love to see a good list of movies that are effected by this that create a problem for me in the USA that I could understand without any interpreter.
Many U.S. citizens consider English a second language and *GASP* sometimes like to watch movies in their native language. Others have become fluent in another language and want to maintain their language skills. Still others Are into fan subbing and wouldn't mind reading the translation off of a sheet of paper or playing an audio recording alongside the video they legitimatly own.
I wonder how the MPAA would like it if labor and resources were 'region coded' so that discs sold in the U.K. had to be made in a U.K. factory out of raw materials from the U.K. Same for other countries. I'll bet they would be awefully upset at the mere suggestion of that! No more buy stuff (including labor) where it's cheap and sell the product where it's expensive.
Next is Jobs, then maybe Gates or Ohaga. Despite their contributions to society, they are just demoralizing humanity right now.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I hadn't ever even considered a DVD player that isn't region free. Now that I already have several discs (R1 and regionless titles) I think I at last have to get a player (I've managed up to date by asking friends with players whether they wanted to watch some title I happened to have).
If I had to choose a single-region player, it'd be R1 anyway, as even though Japan is R2, I can't find any anime in Finland, so I order English subs from USA.
But, it's clear here that a DVD player is region-free. Big shops sell region-free players. They advertise them (including "region-free").
Even earlier I thought I don't want an automatic but a manual region changing, because that was a clear threat - the disc can eg. ask the player for several regions and only accept a player that answers yes on only one region (note that there are also discs that work on several regions, eg 1-4), or some other way to do it.
Note that the error looks different than when I try to play, say, one of these disks while in region 2 mode. When I try to play region 1 in region 2, the player itself gives me an error, ie. I see the error on the Apex backdrop, before the disc finished loading. When I load one of these in region bypass, I get an error from the DVD itself, with a universal logo.
Interestingly, the two Universal DVDs I have that do this are relatively old. Their more recent releases don't have this problem. My guess is that a lot of people with regionless players (many of the original players were regionless) complained.
How this blocking works: DVDs actually do have a programming language on them, and a standard for running it. This is so menus and interactive features can work without the DVD consortium predefining all the special features a DVD could have. If you've ever looked at a DVD's filesystem, the video is in .VOB files, while the code is in .IFO files.
Players include interpreters for this code.
That's why DVDs like the Matrix sometimes cause
problems for some players -- they push the
envelope of the programming language, and expose
bugs in the player implementation.
In case anyone is curious, the Universal DVDs that have this problem are:
Andromeda Strain
Army of Darkness
The Universal DVDs I have that don't have this are:
Being John Malkovich
Battlestar Galactica
Erin Brockovich
Happy Gilmore
Sneakers
What bugs the hell out of me is that different countries get different quality of DVD for the same movie. When Starship Troopers came out as I recall the Region 1 US disc was fantastic with a bunch of extra features. The Region 2 EUROPE disc (Germany etc) had less features but still atleast had the trailers etc and the Region 2 UK disc had the film on a flipper and that was it.
I just bought a top notch sound system because DVD gives you the best sound quality I figure, may as well take advantage. But do you region 1'ers know that in the UK we have *TWO* DTS dvd's and that's it? We're getting our first film RSN, Gladiator. But I look on the web at places like dvdexpress and Region 1 has a huge number of DTS movies.
What about releases that never make it? One of my favourite movies last year was Antz. I personally thought it was better then Bugs Life because the story line was much more 'adult oriented' than 'kid oriented', meaning they could get a bit deeper, some more subtle jokes etc. Bugs Life made it out in the UK but Antz has not to this day been released over here.
I can deal with the time delay, it annoys the hell out of me but I've dealt with it all my life so i'm not gonna use that as another argument.
So if I restrict myself to Region 2 then I get screwed on features, screwed on sound tracks and don't get the movies that I want to have in my collection. Uhhhhh Sorry, what's up with that? What era are we living in again?
If there's a good movie I want then if there is a DTS version I buy it Region 1, if it isn't available over here I buy it Region 1 but if it is over here and high quality then I prefer to support Region 2 - but they bloody well make it hard and this is just going to make it harder. Time to check with the people I got the player from to see whether the mod will be affected by this.
I can see DVD getting strangled by the manufacturers at this rate. One day they'll realise... The only way to prevent piracy, or to prevent use in a form other than you would like, is to NOT RELEASE IT AT ALL. We're all free thinking people after all, we all come up with ideas - especially the Slashdot community.
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Doesn't anyone else think that this is blatant evidence of Time Warner trying to establish a monopoly in the DVD market? Or at least to make themselves an annoying juggernaut in the DeCSS conflict?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
This "justification" of region codes does not match the evidence. If protecting cinematic releases were the only reason for region coding then you'd expect only DVDs of recently relseased movies to be region-coded.
This is not the case -- the vast majority of DVDs have region encoding, including those that have long since left the cinemas (and even some from the first half of the twentieth century).
So it would seem that this "justification" is merely a fig leaf to cover anticompetitive behaviour, least it appear too blatant.
George Bush is 99% in love with you guy!
The trick is to use the characters e, l, o, u, v, and y.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
This technique is old-hat already in use on some MGM Universal discs such as the world is not enough. Basically the DVD specification allows you to branch to a different section based on the players region code. The original hacks were called "Code-Free", "Region 0" or "Legs-Up". These hacks basically ignored the region code at the start of the disc then just played it. The problem with this is that they could then region-branch all regions that should not be able to play the disc to a specific screen. The MGM disc I mentioned displays an MGM message saying the disc is not compatible rather than the DVD players own "Invalid disc" message. This is not something new and will not affect those players that allow region-selection such has been the case on most players for a while. I brought my Panasonic A350 over 2 years ago and it has such a modification. Those people using RemoteSelector with the Creative kit will also be able to continue watching.
[)amien
DISCLAIMER: IANAL, Do not pass Go, Do not remove that tag from your mattress under penalty of law...
If this is true, this could be the grounds for a class-action law suit against Time Warner, the MPAA, DVDCCA, and all those other evil acronyms.
Why? Because, Time Warner would be preventing owners of legally obtained DVD players (yes, there are some region-free players on the market) from playing their new DVDs.
If not, we could just spread some FUD of our own and make it widely known that Time Warner's (and Columbia Tri Star's) new DVD releases might not play on your DVD player...
One thing to remember is that where I live (Quebec), we get movies at the same time as the States but still France has to wait a long time before they see the same movies. I can't see the point of doing this. Hey, it's already dubbed (sometimes, it's even done in France) so they only have to check with lawyers after.
If they would sell each disc in each region (coded for that region), I'd have less problems with that.
What I do have problems with is that I can't get what I want because somebody thinks it's not profitable enough to sell it in Europe. Because of that, I couldn't get it for any price without ordering it from another region.
And I would pay much more if I could get the same disc from within Europe, since shipping and taxes add up quite a lot - enough that if the title IS available in Finland, it's almost certainly a lot cheaper than it'd be ordered from any of the 30+% off webshops.
United States dollars work only in the United States. You could say that they're "region coded" too.
Actually they work in Argentina, Guatemala, and possibly a few other South American countries.
:wq
The problem with your simple model is of course that there is no benevolent superior force capable of taking on the multi-nationals. Governments may have the scale, but not the will or moral force. And there is danger in any supposedly benevolent force, because it is only benevolent as long as it is absolutely correct.
Aren't corporations chartered? Who has power to revoke a charter and what does it take? How much of a dent would being unincorporated in one country make in their power? Are there any examples of this ever being done? Any good tries? I suspect it all traces back to the "corporations are individuals" mistake, what could overturn that in law?
Would making individual company members liable for their products' effects, including criminal liability, do more harm than good? I suspect this would only get engineers hung instead of those who insisted on dodgy tradeoffs, unfortunately. At the least it would start a huge game of CYA.
The only real check I can think of is that of boycott, and that has to be worldwide across a broad spectrum of products to be effective. And it can't work against a monopoly or oligopoly in a critical product. Even when not the case, like here, not the easiest thing to organize, and you need an issue that directly affects millions of people -- region coding probably isn't dramatic enough.
Corporations sometimes aren't stupid. They usually know it is cheaper to keep people happy than enforce their power. If enough people are vocal about an abuse of their power, it can be enough to make them correct it, before government steps in with regulation. Unfortunately, the music and movie industries seem to be a bit substandard in intelligence in this sense, and the governments a little too well bought, which is why we are talking about force here. Ultimately all justice comes down to the proper application of force.
Imaging the pimply fast food guy from The Simpsons voice here:
"I have to get the store manager to call our head buyer, and make sure he puts an ultimatum to Time Warner, Sony, Pioneer and JVC right away - some geek just told me he wouldn't buy a DVD until we have region-free players! And since he wasted an hour looking at ALL the players before telling me that, I feel even more inclined to help him!"
Anything wrong with that?
Seriously, your "activism" is at best just a waste of your time, at worst you're just wasting the time (and possibly the job) of the poor college kid who is just trying to do his job and show you products. Why go through the whole thing of looking at each model to ask the question AFTER finding one you like? Kind of dumb. Why not just ask first, then talk to the manager of the store to express your disappointment that you can't buy a region-free player? He's the only one who might do something about it. J. Random Salesperson is just thinking about the next coffee break.
I really hope your "subversive" action made you feel good, because that's all it achieved. I'd be feeling like a schmuck, because that's one day that I'd never have again.
And one more thing for you to consider. Nobody has any obligation to sell you anything. All they do is offer you a product, and if you want it, you buy it. If you don't, keep your money in your pocket and walk on. These young revolutionaries do so amuse me when they equate legitimate business practices with opression. How about another approach - you get together a team of engineers, get venture capital, license CSS and produce your own shit-hot best-of-everything line-doubled region-free DVD player. If you really think enough people care to make your "subversive" shopping work, they'll be lining up to buy your new product. And given that option, here's a question for you: What have YOU done to change the situation - except for whine at people and hope they take the real action for you?
Actually I don't much care what slack-jawed America can or can't buy. Firstly there's DeCSS. And if I can buy a 75G HD this year, I'll be buying a 300G next year, and maybe a Terabyte a year after that. And if it annoys me I'll just buy several DVD players and mount them in in a rack. Money and ingenuity can get around any copy protection.
Better still, just have a 5 buttons on your hardware DVD player: one for each region. To play a region 1 disc, press 1. From that point on the player is locked at region 1. Same for the other regions. I suppose you could add a sixth "regionless" button for older discs that don't check the player.
Similar arrangement for software DVD players.
Windows is shit.
Another reason is for staggered releases. Movies often come out at different times at different countries. So if a movie comes out on DVD in the US people can't get it elsewhere.
But it seems this is flawed. Someone will figure out how to just translate the US verison into their own region. So people will buy these pirated verisons because they can't get it otherwise.
BTW, is it possible for someone in europe to buy a DVD player from the US so they have a player that can read US discs?
Not ours.
And the studios oughta know better than pass the problem onto the customers?
What? Thinner bottom line?
Though shit.
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
Why not just make a DVD player with a switchable region? Most of your disks will be from a specific region but when you need to play one from another region you just switch it.
The DVD region is a stupid system anyway. Designed by greedy bastards who think they should be able to control who watches their disk. What's next? A region system for books? You get caught reading a chinese book in the USA and we'll send you to jail. and vice versa. Like I said, it's a stupid and, now that I think about it, an un-American, system.
Uhmmm, yeah, sorry. I knew that bit about Manga/Anime, I'm just too darn tired... Yup, many movies are more complete in their non-US versions (just like Debian is... :^) ), mostly when it comes to censoring of explicit sexuality, violence etc. At least in Sweden, almost no movies get censored at all (for some stupid reason, however, they cut a little from American Pie; it's the same version as the US version. The original version is, if I'm not all wrong, almost 5 minutes longer.) If they get cut, it's to shorten them. And IF any censorship is performed, you can still go to "Svenska Censurnämnden" (Swedish institute of Censorship) and demand to see every bleeding second they cut away.
I must admit to have seen some Telesync's/Screeners etc. now and then, and when I then see the movie at the cinema, I often get surprised when I notice scenes that has been cut away in the US versions, often for no apparent reason, except out of fear of sexual content, perhaps...
Mmmm, and of course, some of the best movies are made in Europe anyway, such as Lukas Moodyson's movies "Fucking Åmål" (US title "Show Me Love") and "Tillsammans" (no US title yet; still running on Swedish cinemas), Krzysztof Kieslowski (everything he's made, basically), all the movies based on Astrid Lindgren's books, the Danish Dogma movies, British comedy etc.
You couldn't mod him up, anyway - you already posted to the thread :)</PEDANT>
--
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
Actually, you're also wrong.
Ireland is not part of Great Britain. It's a separate island. The full name of the UK is the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
Oh, and referring to either Great Britain or Ireland as "English" isles is a guaranteed way of offending Welsh, Scottish and Irish people.
Actually, you'll be OK. This latest Warner madness is only targetted at customers trying to watch Region 1 (US) DVDs outside of Region 1. After all, it wouldn't do to annoy the US home market would it. But those dirty furriners can go hang.
... business as usual.
Typical US Imperialism
Regards, Ralph.
Of course I'll be screwed if they say yes as I'm flat out buying lunch most days. It's probably not a good thing to send these stores a message "The people who want region free DVD are broke and never buy anything."
So look up the latest Sony, Phillips web page and at the last minute pretend you're waiting for the new model with the Elecro-Magnetic Polarization Enhancing Dongle.
:wq
I'm no lawyer but...
Is it legal to make a change to DVDs to deliberately break thousands of DVD players? I think both the USDOJ and the European monopolies commission might have something to say about that.
I have so far neglected to buy a DVD player, and I have no intention of ever buying one if it means that at the whim of some bunch of money-grabbing fascists, it can suddenly become usless.
The biggest problem that I can see now is that while many technical people worldwide know what's going on, nobody else seems to care.
Why is it that the average Joe Soap always ignores any problem until it hits the national news? By then the damage is usually done.
How about a campaign to raise awareness of the DVD issue? How many websites would be prepared to link to a responsible site explaining clearly and without bias, the full history and details of the DVD issues?
Or maybe an online petition on a few wellknown websites? This way the names could be forwarded on to the MPAA, DVDCA, DOJ etc. Any other thoughts?
Bzzzzzt..."AAAAaaaaarrrgh!!!" Thud.
Wouldn't this break every existing DVD player on the market today????
The people who will lose out here are people like me, who live in Europe and buy your titles from the US. I do it not to get the titles sooner, or because they are cheaper, but because alot of the titles are not avaliable over here in region 2. All time warner are doing is stopping people buying films.
> There's one more cool thing that can be done
> with this. There are now discs which check the
> GUI region and enable/disable features
> depending on the native region of the player.
> So you might get Chinese subtitles on a region
> 3 player, but not a region 1 player. This lets
> them sell in multiple regions, but they only
> have to master the disc once, and only keep one
> item in stock. Ghostbusters II is supposed to
> be one of these.
This will only work if the two (or more) countries they are region-coding it for share the same video signal format. You couldn't, for example, make a disc that would work in both the US and the UK (well, you COULD, but it would probably play in black and white on older televisions)
And not the US government -- but the small country next to Australia, New Zealand. Why? Because it is ILLEGAL in New Zealand to sell a region coded DVD. You really think the NZ govt is not going to do something about this?
...
:)
Think about it -- to do this, anywhere that makes region coding illegal will either have to be excluded totally from DVD distribution (which a govt. doesnt want, and can sue over if they are a WTO member, which NZ is), or 'special' DVD's will have to be released for that country, at cost of course, to the MPAA.
Of course, they could make Region 4 DVD's NOT do this kind of checking, but that would defeat the purpose, wouldnt it -- people would just import DVD's from Australia or something. And god forbid if people holidaying in Australia who should happen to buy a DVD be able to play their DVD at home
Watch this one closely -- the NZ govt may not have much pressure to push, but being such a small nation, it pulls alot of sympathy -- so others may back it for that reason alone. The world is a funny place.
Of course, NZ could sell DVD players powered by DeCSS, I'm sure the MPAA would be absolutely THRILLED about that one
Or if your player has been modified in the manner that mine has. I don't have a region-free dvd player, my player requires me to switch the region that the player will be at the moment, so it can be a region 3 or a region 1 but never both a region 3 and a region 1.
I'm assuming this won't affect me, or my habit of buying DVDs from regions other than my specified ones. I'd actually be rather shocked if it did.
"Don't trolls get tired?"
---
Assassinations, while a fun and extremely tempting idea, are totally unnecessary in this case, since (as several people have already mentioned) this practice has already been used by some companies and is about as much trouble to circumvent as it is to make a hole in a wet paper bag in the monsoon season.
Now, the next question is, why doesn't Big Business just release the movie everywhere at the same time? That's another evil conspiracy, right? No. Copying a film is not like copying an MP3. Copying a film is hard
Er, I think you will find that the "movies everywhere" issue is not technical (well semi technical in once sense) but marketing. First, big movies need kids on school holidays, so calendar timing is an issue. Second big movies need big screens. If there are only X big screens in a given town then there can only be X times n films per day, where n is the number of sessions that can be commercially scheduled. Now even worse than this is the fact that the scum sucking distributors will almost always demand exclusivity on a given screen (or auditorium capacity) for a given period of time before they will allow the theatre to show the film. (Anyone in NY remember trying to see Phantom Menace when it first came out? How many "big screens" did it get? Around two cause lucasfilm wanted a 90 (almost unheard ofly large) day billing guarantee.
The whole process of movie distribution is killing independent film houses since the distributors want to screw _every_ penny out of them that they can. HAve you ever wondered why cinema pop corn is more expensive than gold? (well it might not be but it sure seems like it) Its because when a new movie comes out the distributor will take 100% of gate takings (thats right 100% of the face value of the ticket) for the first n weeks (or screenings) and this will then decrease through 90, 75 down to sometimes 50. And remember this is ticket prices, so the distributors also demand the price of the tickets themselves be as high as possible. SO the poor buggers that might own a huge floor space building in prime retails space (where a lot of cinemas exist) have to cover their business by robbing us at the concession stand.
Let's not forget the practice of the distributors working out that a big name film is so shit that they hide it from the reviewers, open it on a thousand screens for one weeked, get _everyone_ to see it at the first instance and then once the word gets out that it's shit, shut it down having grossed much more than they could other wise manage. And do you think that the distributors might tie one good film to three shit ones at the same picture house. Hmmm...
As an organsing member of a university film society in Oz, where we would show 2 films for three bucks, we were regularly asked by the distributors to bump up our ticket prices but I guess they figured we weren't worth fighting over, so they let us get away with it, still charging us 50% of gate or $200 for each film (whichever was greater). We could only get a limited range of films, usually after cinema but before video so it was a good deal for the students (and quite a social experience, but I digress). So what do you think happened when the distributor run multiplex opened across the road from the campus? Yup it just became harder to get that distributors films (bloody UIP!!!)
Anyway, back to the point. Cinema is Cinema, and no matter how good (except perhaps if you have a 25foot wall and your own LCD projector) your home cinema is, it aint film on a big white wall. I personally dig sitting in the front row and getting "cinemaed" by the full experience. Which, btw, is how the movie industry reinvented itself to the punting public in the mid eightes when video first caned them (well at least in Oz). So the lack of bums on seats cause they're at home watching it on 32inches doesn't really cut it.
As for region codes, it is purley a pricing device, so that they can charge X in India versus Y in Europe vs Z in America so that they can ensure that the % of disposable income that can be consumed by their "product" can be maximised in the different markets by placing the purchase decision at the right kind of "impulse" pricepoint and the right comparative level wrt to a cinema ticket. I can only hope that someone makes a successful anti competitive practice case against regioning (hey maybe I should get off my ass and do it myself, but it's sooo tiring). I am one of the suckers that struggles to resist buying the bloody things as well, although I do manage to resist the recent tat and focus on the "historical" moments of cinema or ones that I personally adore, I still give them my $$$ because I am weak.
I'm sorry for the tirade, but the motion picture industry is a cynical and immoral marketing machine that screws no only the consumer but the business people who are trying to pervey cinema to the hungry audience. It is tragedy that such tryanny has become so bad in the last half century (the comparison to the plight of the performers in the first half of last century is interesting) that I am hoping that technology can bring down the cost of production and distribution so far that the big houses can go and get stuffed. Digital movies anyone?
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Everything can be cracked, given enough time & effort.
With such a high profile hack, as breaking the new region things would be, someone will surly take a look at it, and it will be broken eventually.
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
2. If so, they'll have to go after a lot of DVD manufacturers, including Sony, Hitachi, Panasonic, for leaving secret codes to unlock their players.
3. I don't believe a court would allow DMCA to sanction price fixing, in this case.
(if you want me to be obedient and don't temper with region locks, first sell your friggin discs at the same price worldwide)
4. DVDCCA's strongest arguments for the DeCSS case surround piracy, not DCMA violation. Region coding has absolutely nothing to do with piracy (yes, some pirates use DeCSS, admit it), and they know that.
5. Finally, to have it protected, there has to be an international law because region coding is by definition an international thing - only enforcing it in the US is a waste of effort.
Fortunately, DMCA is not international (yet).
an Apex. It allows you to turn the region feature on and off. So if this is true, alls I have to do is turn the region thingy back on.
:)
And thanks Slashdot, since this is the place where I heard about the apex
> Note: The Latin-derived word meaning "to work around" is "circumvent."
No, "circumvent" means "blow wind around". Which is exactly what our response to access control systems should be.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But DMCA only covers devices that allow copying. Watching a region-encoded DVD on a region-free player doesn't allow copying. (macrovision-free does and might be covered under DMCA)
--
>Kan du lese dette er du Norsk
:-)
Eller svensk. Jag har inga problem att förstå norska...
They make all the discs for different regions in Taiwan or where ever they can get cheap labor. The problem they have is that they have a hard time with factories operating at night or producing an "overrun" with the production line. So then, all those region 1 movies that they don't want played in China won't play on their "legal" region 6 player.
This is probably why the MPAA is so cranky about DECSS. Because now it is possible to change the region now on the DVDs and then cut different discs (in a hidden factory somewhere) and stamp out millions of copies.
I really do not think pirating is a problem in the US of video anymore (it is in China). Traditional channels of copyright protection exist with legal remedies to take care of unauthorized copying. The MPAA is shaking in their boots over a video "napster" however, and once you watch a movie, you tend not to watch it again unlike listening to music. What they need to do is add extra value to the DVDs - like maybe a complete soundtrack with the DVD, a copy of the screenplay, history of the writing of the screenplay etc. etc.
But these same channels do not exist in other countries, and there is little if any debate there whether it is "moral" or not. It's "just done".
The sad thing is that the MPAA has to buy off congress (done) and knife the constitution (getting ready to turn the knife) to protect their profit in other countries not even pertaining to the US.
However I say this with a caveat. If the price of DVDs climb like that what has been happening with CDs, then it suddenly becomes "economical" to pirate. This raises a whole other issue as to why CDs are so expensive and the price never drops. There obviously is no market pressure on the few big players (aka price fixing?), and as the judge in the Napster case astutely noted "why isn't there any singles like 45s in the old days?" (because it costs the same to do a single !!!)
Another thought, if the term of copyright was lowered to a term of twenty years (like patents), then there would be an inspiration to create more, better and cheaper movies. huh??
So it is really about achieving control and greed. Not that I think that people should "steal" music and video, but that it is more of a symptom. If traditional market pressures existed in the recorded movie/music business (as it obviously doesn't now - antitrust issues are rife here) I doubt if we would even be having these problems now.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Okay I don't know much about DVD playback but this seems technologically impossible.
This new standard is supposed to still work on current one region players right. Isn't all a multi-region player is is a player which can emulate any regions players?
The only way I can imagine them doing something like this is to put this extra warning in a section encoded for the wrong region. That way the multi-region players will play this sopt which will issue the warning and somehow stop the playing of the rest of the DVD.
This of course will last about 10 minutes before the multi-region players merely become region selectable players.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
US Dollars work damn near anywhere on earth. The US $100 is just about all that anyone will accept as a truly reliable currency in many places...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
This thread brings up an interesting thought regarding US vs. international law. The MPAA/USDoJ will go nuts trying to enforce a US law against a foreign person if the MPAA is being screwed (case in point: Jon Johansen), but they won't enforce US law covering a US organization that is engaged in international trade if the MPAA is profiting from the illegal activity (the MPAA again, and the conflict between region coding/price fixing and the Sherman Anti-trust act someone pointed out earlier in this thread). Hmmm...the words "corporate republic" come to mind.
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
All laws are valid as well as just
If that were the case then why would the American Constitution have ammendments? Not all laws are just or valid. That is why we have a correctable system of government. Facism was law in Nazi Germany, did that mean that everyone had to help round up the Jews simply because it was the law? Please. Read Civil Disobedience or http://members.tripod.com/Chet22/disobedience.htm
>United States dollars work only in the United States. You could say that they're "region coded" too.
Wrong.
US dollars are the offical currency of a growing number of countries. At least two countries in South America (Panama? Guyana?) as well as several Island nations. US Dollars are a main currency of any international deal in North Africa. Reale state deals in Egypt are offten in US dollars.
The goverment bank of New Zealand is currently considering using either a joint Oz/NZ money (which Oz said no way!), Oz money or US money. Claims it will cost the goverment $150 mil a year but will offset much more than that by the continuded dropping of the NZ dollar.
Bollocks. DVDs cost about 50% more in UK than US. Unsurprisingly the price difference is less extreme here in CH where region-free players are the norm.
Regards, Ralph.
Many region 1 disks have had this restriction
for a while now!! Many DVD players support
Region 1-10 and Bypass. Think of this simply
as 11 regions. Most discs are supposed to run
with Region 1 or Bypass. Some will detect bypass,
and refuse to run. The solution is to use a
player like the older Apex which allows you to select the exact region.
However, from my experience working directly with the guys producing Universal (and other DVCC-sourced) titles, they have always tried to test the region coding for just the exact bit set only, (an and), not just an or on the flag.
You're right, but I would simplify it to one reason: To maximize profit.
This still doesn't mean I can watch cyrano, which is, as I see it, a problem.
and this also doesn't mean that I won't be moving back to europe at some point, at least for a few years... of course, I never once saw a dvd player that wouldn't play region 1 dvds (except for in the Sony store), and racks of region 1 dvds are all over the place. I just hope the EU would sue to get this breach of trade law cleared up!
fat chance, eh?
Lea
Basically, a DVD player has not one, but two places that contain the region code. One is a bitmap with one bit per region, stored in the MPEG stream. Normally, a player will only play a disc with a specific bit set in the region code bitmap, and a disc will have one or more regions set.
Note that there are eight bits, but only six regions. The other two are reserved for future use. In fact, I think one of them is intended for use in special situations, like in-flight movies on airplanes. I have found disks advertised as "all region", which would not play in regions 7 or 8, and others which would play in all regions 1 thru 8.
The second place is in a register that is readable by the GUI code. (As mentioned in an earlier response, this is register #20.) Because this is an integer, it can contain only one region code at any given time. So the player will have one "native" zone, regardless of how permissive its bitmap is.
There are two types of region mods. One, typically called "region zero", is to simply disable the MPEG region checking. This is like using a crowbar to open a locked door. The second is to make the player truly switch regions so that it becomes a player from another region. This is like having a keyring with all the keys on it. (I suppose there's also a third way, which is to region-zero the bitmap, and make the GUI region switchable for trick disks. Or even better yet, have it check the bitmap and set register #20 automatically. I guess this would be like having a master key. But I haven't heard about people doing this.)
The "region-zero" mod won't change your GUI region, so any "trick" disk from the same region as the "native" region of the player, will always play, as always. However, the mod itself may change the native region of the player from its factory setting, say to zone 1, which is the most useful.
Switching the regions works well, and some players let you do that from secret codes on the remote. But such players may also have a built-in counter so that you can only change regions 5-25 times before it stays locked.
The best are players which have been modded to be infinitely region switchable, and Macrovision disabled. The Pioneer 505, 909, and 606 (from before Pioneer changed their logo) were famous for only requiring two jumper wires be soldered to the MPEG board. Then the CONDITION button in the right menu would switch regions.
There's one more cool thing that can be done with this. There are now discs which check the GUI region and enable/disable features depending on the native region of the player. So you might get Chinese subtitles on a region 3 player, but not a region 1 player. This lets them sell in multiple regions, but they only have to master the disc once, and only keep one item in stock. Ghostbusters II is supposed to be one of these.
There is a similar situation with the Playstation. Most Playstation chips work by blasting the special subcodes over and over into the right input. However, many of the people who installed chips also happened to sell games, and were just as annoyed at piracy as Sony was. So someone came up with the "anti-piracy" chip. This chip watched for the first three bytes of the subcode (SCEA, SCEJ, SCEE), and blasted the last byte of the USA code whenever it saw them. A CD-R wouldn't have the subcodes, and the chip would know it.
Then someone came up with a trick to check for chips by only putting the subcodes where it was necessary to boot the game. It would check parts of the disc that did NOT have the subcodes, and get pissed if it found them. The best part was that anti-piracy chips had no trouble with this scheme, because they didn't send the subcodes when they weren't supposed to. (Sure, someone then came up with the "stealth" chip, which disables itself after running long enough to boot a disc, but that's not as l33t as the way anti-piracy chips work.)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
That's why ns's <blink> tag was so maligned.
:->
You forgot to preview before you hit submit. You need to escape your angle brackets -- use < for the < and > for the >
You're right about people hating flashing -- it's kind of disturbing seeing a post flash at me on Slashdot!
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
Joe Public probably buys his DVDs at the same store he bought his player, and has no idea about region coding, content scrambling, DeCSS, or the way the MPAA has starting making up copyright protections.
Big bold letters to the effect of "You can't play this $30 disc in your $200 player, and sorry we didn't tell you sooner" may be just what it takes to make this issue a public concern, rather than just a small underground vs. big business thing.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Erm, well, I think you can. Logic goes as follows:
Warner are adding coding to their Region 1 (only) DVDs that checks if the player is region free. If it is then no can play.
Your Region 2 Cyrano will not contain this new code so you can play it happily on your region free player in the US.
Of course, you will now have the same problems playing your Region 1 DVDs as us naughty unwashed Europeans. Which batters my earlier comment about American imperialism a little, except that there's certainly a higher percentage of region-free players in Yoorp than in US.
All clear?
Regards, Ralph.
no problem there, PAL quality is much better than NTSC
Unfortunately, even if the CEO of Best Buy called up the CEO of Sony and said that he should start manufacturing DVD players without region encoding, they wouldn't do it. What they would do is use the legal force behind the DMCA to crack-down on stores that sell region-free players, put more pressure on Customs to prohibit the import of those players, and maybe even persuade other government's police forces to stop their manufacture (just like the DeCSS case.)
THAT, I think, is the most likely course of action.
you didn't tell us which model
7thzone.com has an extensive selection of 'region-free solutions'.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I don't really understand the point for regions. Really... what does Japan, China or Europe have to hide from North American and on their DVDs? Anyone have decent answer for this?
No, the APEX player is not illegal under the DMCA.
Yet.
There are provisions of the DMCA which, according to the text of the legislation, take effect two years after the law is signed. This will be October 28, 2000. On that date, the region-free APEX player will become illegal.
Reading between the lines, it looks like what is going on is that the disc exploits the details of the region coding spec to detect if the player will support more than one region. Unless the player rejects the non-region-1 portion of the disc, the region-1 part won't play. The MPAA must be feeling very happy that their original region coding implementation allowed for this.
Now this is easy to bypass. The trick is that you have to have the player figure out what region the disc wants and switch to that region, and that region only. For now, this will require a player that allows you to manually reset the region. For example, with my Raite 715 DVD/MP3 player, I can use a secret menu to set it to region free, or to any specific region. Hence, I can set it to only region 1 for these new DVDs and to region free when I want to play some other region.
Eventually, we can hope someone will put out a player that detects that the majority of the content is flagged for a given region, so it will switch to that region. What would be really cool is a DVD player with open-source firmware. Hey, that's what Livid is!
The flaw here is that the disc is not capable of actually detecting anything. To detect something, some software is going to have to run on the player. That means that the player is in charge, and can do whatever it wants with the software. Namely, the player could be programmed to simply return whatever return code is neccessary for the DVD's software to continue executing, instead of showing the warning on the screen.
This is a really silly move on the part of Warner. It is going to cost them money to do this. It will certainly also cost them goodwill. It will not be effective. Existing DVD players could be modified to work around this. New DVD players can be designed to work around this. Software which runs on general-purpose computers (e.g. livid) can easily be modified to circumvent this.
I imagine that Warner's software is going to try to detect a multi-region player by presenting itself as two different regions and seeing if the player will play both. The solution is simple and obvious: once the player chooses a region for the DVD, lock that region in and always claim to be a player from that region until another disc is inserted. There isn't any writeable memory on a DVD, so it isn't as if the disc itself can store the region code of the player.
Chances are NZ's laws will be "harmonised" with international IP treaties, and regionalised DVD players will become the standard there soon enough. The movie studios' budgets dwarf the NZ Gross National Product by orders of magnitude, so if it came to a trade war, they could afford to embargo New Zealand and put a lot of pressure on the government there.
Scary, without ever having learned Norwegian, I can easily guess what it means.
Maar kan U dit lezen? Bijna het zelfde taal, zeg!
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
I don't see myself ever buying a DVD. To start with, I don't want to subsidise the MPAA's stupidity, and apart from that the quality doesn't seem that great.
:)
Is it just me, or does a new VHS tape on a 6-head VCR seem just as good as DVD but without the MPEG artifacts?
Now if I didn't care about artifacts I'd probably go for DIVX encoded movies on CD-ROM
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Presumably this modification is only going to catch player that have been hacked to Region 0 (All Regions)? Most hacks seems to set the player to a specific, non-zero, region with an option to change it on the fly (is this true?) or on command. I don't think the mod will catch these players.
But what do I know...? Comments?
Hi!
My impression was that this is a simple state-machinish description language that is used to determine when to play various portions of the disc. If this is the case, then this would only be possible if that language provided some way to query the region code of the player, and I don't think this is the case.
As I understand the system, it's the player's responsibility to check the region of the disc and disable playback if the region code doesn't match.
Even if there is some way for the disc to query the player, the simple workaround is to have a player report a single region at a time; don't say you're a regionless player, make like a region 1 player until the user tells you otherwise. At worst, you've got a situation where you have to manually reset the region code for a movie.
Unless I'm missing something big here?
Same in Australia.
The players themselves are region-crippled, but the salesman wastes no time in telling you that they offer a professional modification service for a reasonable fee.
This was the case for 2 department stores and 3 hifi stores that I tried. It's almost the first thing out of the salesman's mouth.
And all the local stores have Region-1 displays in addition to their usual Region-4 areas.
Everyone's ignoring the regions. It's costing us money to fix the players, and it's a pain in the arse, but nobody respects it. Especially not the stores or player manufacturers.
A while back I bought a LEGAL player, I just bought a LEGAL disk while abroad and now I found I can not play it in this combination.
I am strongly considering returning it to the local rep of the movie comp./player manufactorer with a demand to have it exchanged for one that DOES play or else I claim fraud on behalf of the retailer/distributor......
BTW: in Europe the majority of players sold are region free.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Player thinks: could be one of the sneaky bastards i've heard of... Hey, I AM the hardware doing that 'intelligence' stuff here!
P: Tell me what you want to hear! I'm using the force of the blue lightsaber! You can't possibly beat me!
D: (wincing) I am coded for region 1, O you almighty player!
P: (taking notes) OK, now that this is out of the way, we might start again. *RESET*
I think anyone can think what it's going like next time. Just wanted to clarify that a DVD can never ask for anything. It's just the player following stupid orders.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Look at the constitution;
Article I section 8 of the constitution states that the purpose of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors exclusive right to their respective Writings...."
(bold mine)
This is clear. It says that the copyright should go to the author. It does not say that it goes to the author's children, grandchilderen, distant relatives, or corporate interest. When congress originally passed the first extension to the copyright law in 1831 (upon renewal for a total term of 28years) none of the original framers of the constitution were even in the congress to vote on it, and only one (Madison) was alive.
Retroactive changes to the length of a term of copyright are wrong, in my opinion. I would have no problem with Disney lobbying for longer and longer copyright terms .
The problem is that "ex post facto" is Disney's middle name. See here. So it's ok for big money to argue for retroactive changes, but if the public does, then screw them??? The thing is that if the public ever does, they don't have the money "to grease the wheels" to move legislation through. There are no glamerous movie stars, no expensive parties, no expensive lobbyists to take congress out to dinner. That's they way it has been for the last tenty-five years until now you have David Corwin, senior counsel for the Motion Picture Association of America, saying that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is "near and dear to our heart." See here.
The fact of the matter is that anybody who studies this issue even just a little bit realize that the public's interest has aalways been nothing more than an afterthought. Indeed, the author of this analysis noted that with the task force on the DMCA;
The message of these recommendations seems to be that the Task Force will see what rights are left over for the public once the rights of the authors have been firmly established.
And this was before the passage of the Sonny Bonno Copyright Term Extension Act!
So we have reached the point now that the only rights left to take away are constitutional ones, such as freedom of speech, fair use, the right of first sale, and the established right to reverse engineer and have interoperability. So now copyright holders are taking those too!
What really has been "ex post facto" has been the endless retroactive copyright terms over the last 40 years.
with Disney lobbying for longer and longer copyright terms if the longer terms only affected new works
For the first time in our history, nothing is falling into the public domain due to the CTEA. So, as a citizen, why should I support some government granted monopoly if I get nothing in return??? Where is the Quid Pro Quo???? These same companies that are suing Napster are the ones who lobbyied and effectively "paid" congress for the CTEA, not to mention the DMCA. Look at it, what is this story and thread about?? Companies who do not want us to use Napster or DVDs on linux, but at the same time are taking our fundamental rights as citizens away, not to mention the old (and I mean old) works that were supposed to enter the public domain?
So what reason do I have to support their so called "copyright" when they are effectively taking all my "rights" away????
Time for a little counterpoint, don't you think?
If the term length is set by legislation (I am not certain if it is or not), then in what way is this not ex post facto?
If you read the constitution, the "right to copy" was originally intended to go to the author only for limited times. So the only "ex post facto" here is the endless copyright term extensions??
It's so ludicrously bad now, that you have the government arguing that extending copyright is a national tradition This statement (in their brief to the appelant court, see openlaw) is so outrageously absurd that it defies description. So by their reasonong, congress twenty years ago had planned on retroactively extending copyright terms now, and in another twenty years they are going to do it again, ad infinitum???
Why didn't congress back in 1976 just extend copyright law for another 100 years? Or is congress just trying to "circumvent" the "limited times" clause of the constitution???? What's "ex post facto" about saying that is wrong??
So, what congress is doing is whoring themselves to special corporate interests by defrauding the public of their due. There is no nicer way to put it.
Please forgive me if this post seems like a flame. But your statement illustrates perfectly why many of us over at openlaw shake our heads. On the surface it seems very logically and correct, but in reality it could not be further from what is right. I'm really glad you made your post, because it illustrates beautifully the widespread ignorance of how the publics' rights are being ripped off by a prostituted congress. I do not say this lightly.
So I invite you to become familiar with the openlaw site, and I hope to see you on the discussion boards there. Some of the people their are extremely smart, and when I open my mouth I get it slapped!!!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Bah.
- Don't take etymological claims too literally when they are invoked to serve a joke.
<pedantic>- Though the word doesn't actually exist in English, the derivation required by the joke is quite legitimate -
- circum, "around".
- uentus, "wind" (in addition to similar forms derived from uenio, "come, go").
- The OLD shows that uentus was in fact used for "intestinal wind", as required by the joke.
- The word derived from the above would have been a noun rather than a verb. However, you could still invoke the English mechanism of using the form of a noun for a verb (e.g., "document", n. ~ "document", v.; "box" ~ "box"; etc. ad flogadeadhorseum).
- Therefore the joke works. At least for some people.
- On second thought, the word does exist in English, ever since I coined it yesterday.
</pedantic>--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
They aren't.
It isn't.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
There are two types of region-free players: the not so good ones are set to region 0, making them region-non-specific, so to say. The hack described in the memo tests for such players and has been used by other movie studios (Disney) before. The better ones are region changeable, meaning you can switch the region. For example, if it's a player from the US, it's region 1 by default, but you can switch it to region 2 to watch Japanese DVDs.
Bottom line: most region-hacked players are region changeable, so this is not a problem.
I work for a record store in Australia and our Warner rep sent us a copy of the letter last week which I submitted to slashdot. (Note: the best way to get a story on slashdot is to submit it to ZDNet, Wired, or even DVD Debate.)
I find it interesting that they explicity mention that the CSS licensing agreement requiresa DVD player to be region specific. Everyone except Judge Kaplan knew CSS was primarily an access control mechanism, this announcement demonstrates the importance the MPAA members attatch to it.
:wq
This would only encourage boot leggers to create find another way around region control. What I would do is first unencrypt the dvd with Decss then create a new DVD with a particular regions code. Now I have DVD that can be read in any region I want.
Compare:
Big movies typically get released in the U.S. first. After a few months, they move to Europe... a few months after that, they trickle down to the rest of the world. By the time a movie has its theatrical premiere in Europe or Asia, it has often been released in America on video or DVD. If Europeans can chose between renting a new movie for $4 and seeing it in theaters for perhaps $70 (for a whole family,) a whole lot of them are going to skip the theaters. That kind of defeats the purpose of a theatrical release... hence region codes. But how many people have 40+ inch TV screens w/ 6 speaker 3D sound support? When they sell the movie in a movie theater, what should be sold is not the actual show, but the atmosphere. Watching a movie in a movie theater is completely different then watching it at home on your 18 inch TV. ;)
If the buisness model was changed to accomadate this, it would work better. The real problem is the overcharged candy in theaters.
I am a bad speler. Please ignore speling meestakes in me poast.
Incidentally, for the sake of those Canadians who complain about our low dollar (when buying American goods), its making our GNP go up because of American foreign purchasing. A lot of smart canadian companies are starting to go online to sell to americans ... great deals on products made in the USA ;-)
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
No, current DVDs still use CSS. The players don't know how to decode anything else.
This is reason for concern for anyone who owns a DVD player that is "region-free," however I haven't heard of such a player before. I own an Apex, and while you are able to bypass region encoding, it is supposed to be region 1 and is set to region 1 by default. Unless there are DVD players out on the market that were specifically designed to bypass whatever standards were set for region encoding, I don't see how this would actually affect anyone.
...And don't forget to do the same thing when shopping for a new Sony Playstation 2 capable of playing DVD's.
This is really an old stale argument. According to this you should be able to purchase region-free DVD's for movies released before, lets say, 1990. These movies were certainly shown in all regions of this planet. But you can't buy those region-free (code 0), except may be Robocop (1987). Take a look at the list of Region 1 movies at IMDB and notice how few of them are available in Region 2.
...
THIS DISC IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH THIS PLAYER
...
This part of the message makes me think that WHV should start producing their discs in another way, since it (the disc) is not compatible with my player. Cause my player happens to be able to play virtually any other disc, from any region, and if WHV don't have the money to make a small piece of plastic (with no moving parts!) work on a player that handles anything else, then how can they make a movie worth watching?
---
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
I don't believe that this is anything particularily new. I think other DVD creators have already been doing this.
Region code checking is up to the DVD player. Does the region code of the player match the region code of the disk?
Yes, play the disk
No, don't play the disk
However the DVD standard allows for assembly language like code to be put on the disk. Normally this is used to do the menus and other things. However you can use to further check that the region code reported from the DVD makes sense.
For example:
Mov GPRM0, SPRM20 ; get the region code of the player
NE GPRM0, 1 ; If region code is not exactly ONE
GOTO Failure ; then either this is the wrong player or the user hacked it.
For further info see the July 98 edition of DDJ.
A new VHS tape on a X-head VCR might approach the image quality of a DVD, but only the first or second time you play it- Tapes wear out.
A higher-end home theater system would include 6.1 digital audio decoding, component video, anamorphic widescreen television. Watch a movie on such a setup, and you'll throw away your VHS VCR.
I never purchased movies on tape, but now I have a medium-priced DVD player and many DVD movies, these are the reasons I buy DVDs:
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
This will kill my DVD player. My DVD player, out of the box, never supported region codes. It was one of several flaws in its design, although the features vastly outweigh its flaws (it produces very high quality progressive output and also performs line doubling of all other video sources).
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
and me with no points to moderate you up with ^^;;
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Another thought, if the term of copyright was lowered to a term of twenty years (like patents), then there would be an inspiration to create more, better and cheaper movies. huh??
Retroactive changes to the length of a term of copyright are wrong, in my opinion. I would have no problem with Disney lobbying for longer and longer copyright terms if the longer terms only affected new works, not those whose terms were about to expire. If the term length is set by legislation (I am not certain if it is or not), then in what way is this not ex post facto?
Likewise, I think that if the term was shortened as you suggest, the new term should only apply to new works, not existing works.
With the online retailers, we must discuss the need to properly notify consumers outside the region 1 territories that the disc may not play in their player before the disc is purchased. The customer dissatisfaction and returns risk is significant if this is not done.
It seems that they are worried this might result in an avalanche of returns if the dealers fail to warn customers. I think it's within our power to make that a reality. What would they do if a whole slew of people bought "The Patriot" and returned it, claiming it displayed a message telling them their player wasn't compatible? Is the dealer going to come to your house to see for himself? Hmmmm... Might get really interesting if you go through several DVDs trying to get one that will play.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I spent 5 months out in New Zealand this year, and I investigated if the NZ players were by law region free. Everyone I spoke to (even NZ-DVD mailing list ops) had no idea what I was talking about.
Now, most of the players for sale could be chipped by the store, but that's not the same thing.
I may be wrong, but until I actually see a legal document stating this fact (or even better, some sort of precedent in an actual legal case) I'll consider this wishful thinking.
-- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"
Since most of the circumventors live ouside the US, and want to play region 1 DVD's on their region 2 players, and the DMCA is US only, I don't think the DMCA will be very relevant to this issue.
From this CDR faq;
The 80mm CD didn't catch on everywhere. In some markets, notably the USA, the smaller discs are rarely seen. The 80mm CD-R made a brief appearance, and then vanished.
And from this person who sells them;
3" CDs were among the first CD singles to be released, they kept the distinction between album and single and were widely welcomed by the record buying public. They were however doomed.
Shortly after they bought CBS, Sony announced that the "extra expense" of making CD players that could accomodate 3" CDs was unnacceptable and, being one of the largest makers of both players and discs, they easily killed the format.
With the release of Minidisc only a few years later a much more likely reason for Sony's actions can be seen.
The 3" format is now highly collectable as the numbers pressed in the late 80s were very small.
Ironically most new CD players, including Sonys, will play 3" CDs.
I suspect that this collectibility factor and the internet, plus $20+ CDs are starting to bring them back. It's just that in some areas (like mine) they are to be found nowhere in stores.
If they were to charge $1 a single I'd bet you'd see them everywhere on earth though.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Why all the hassle about region codes, why does it exist in the first place?
Answer: To try and prevent mass illegal copying of disks (A multi million dollars industry in China and the former soviet union). To also allow DVD players in heavily censored countries (china et al) to only be able to play DVD's that are APPROVED of in that country!!
Actual affect of such codes on the illegal copier? None On the public? Added cost, restricted use (what fair use???), and if you happen to travel a lot, your dvd's are worthless when you go home to show Mom and Dad.
DVD is starting to catch on, but as the MPAA continues to do things that just aren't convenient for the consumer, people will continue to thwart the over zealous copyright/censorship efforts. Viscous circle, the more you make it hard for people to do things they EXPECT to be able to do, the more pressure from the consumer for alternatives. This is just another round in a stupid circle.
Funny how the MPAA and the RIAA say "Don't censor us, censorship bad, blah blah blah". Yet they support region codes so that they can sell censored versions of a movie to some country that thinks that a free press and free thinking public should be banned. No Irony there?
Stop the ride I wanna get off.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Just a minor nitpick:
Amazon experimented with different prices for different customers, but has promised never to do it again.
Also, Amazon stated that they didn't target prices based on customer profiles; instead they were experimenting to determine how much the price influenced purchasing decisions. That may or may not be true, but if it is, then it isn't nearly as bad as had been feared.
There are two types of region-free players-- those that have their region permanently hard-wired to the "no-region" region, (I can't remember which one that is... sorry) and those that are "region selectable", like the Apex AD-600A. Region selectable players won't have a problem with anything that they can do to the DVD without breaking compatibility. Good ones (or well-modified ones) are even selectable via the remote. Once you pick a region, the player *is* region-specific player for the region you have chosen. Problem solved.
So... What does it mean? :)
Umm, if you go into the shop claiming you already have a whole rack full of Japanese DVDs but claiming you don't know squat about regeion coding, you'd better speak in a Japanese accent and act like you just arrived
Or maybe a New Zealand accent.
If a bloke in one's neighbourhood made a pain of himself to the community, we'd just drag him behind the bushes and beat the crap out of him. It's called Pavlovian training.
What is the equivalent method for imparting a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
United States dollars work only in the United States. You could say that they're "region coded" too.US Dollars are acceptable currency on many aircarft and ships at one time they were more acceptable than roubles in Moscow hotels...
For you are in violation of the law. The law in particular is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. You are not allowed to talk about defeating this technological protection measure. Sorry, but you must obey the terms of licenses and laws at *ALL* times whether you like it or not. The law is not for you to decide. Consider this an order under the DMCA to stop this discussion at once.
Ah, but it doesn't require tamper-proof hardware, only hardware that is sufficiently tamper-resistant.
Here's one piece of the puzzle: let's say that the digital link between a future digital monitor and your video card is encrypted, meaning that open-source software with the keys embedded would defeat the purpose.
...meaning that open-source video drivers for such hardware could conceivably be illegal for much the same reason DeCSS is.
Open Source operating systems suddenly become very, very screwed.
Expand this approach to other hardware.
Game, set, match. I hope you enjoyed your right to read while it lasted.
By the way, Intel is already working on this.
HAND ^_^
DNA just wants to be free...
This will effectively stop any player that is marked as region-free, ie region #0 or set to ignore regions. But if you have a player that you can manually set whatever region you want, this protection is useless.
Do not anger the worm.
What's so bad about playing a DVD in another reigon? I don't see a problem on which DVD player you play it on. As long as I bought the DVD, I should be able to play it anywhere... At least that's the way I see it.
-Brandon
The end result of all this was a ton of headache for Sony. There have been at least half a dozen different models of the PSX, and in the latest revision they've ditched the serial ports (which means that devices like Gamesharks, which have uses that even Sony considers okay, are useless). Of course, mod-chips still exist, piracy is still rampant, and the people who are doing something LEGAL like importing games get screwed trying to keep up with all of this.
I'd hate it if something like this happens with DVD players thanks to the industry's sheer stupidity. This isn't even about piracy, but about people wanting to do perfectly legal things. It's completely insane...
It's better to let all of this DVD stuff fall flat on it's face just like Sony digigal audio tape. If it's a pain to use it will fail. Rember DIVX?
Why would anyone (in the US) buy video equipment now anyway? HDTV standards are still up in the air. The old TV and VCR satisfies all my prefab cultrue needs for now.
It seems that players which can have their region codes set manually should be okay in the face of this new check.
;-)
Region-Free players will not reject any tracks on the basis of region alone - I guess the software on the individual disks will therefore flash up the message and stubbornly refuse to play in this case...
But I know that the early players that could be hacked were not Region-Free or 'multi-region', they were single-region players that could have their region changed. My Philips player (can't remember the model number) does this - all I have to do is enter an easy-to-remember 30-odd digit code on the remote
After applying the change, the player simply thinks that it's in a different region. These new disks should still play perfectly well.
I think a few software players operate the same way.
Of course, any new software players that try to actively circumvent this probably won't receive a CSS decryption key (don't really know how that works anyway)...
Cheers,
-J.
Chrysler knows that codefreedvd.com is using thier logo as ratings stars...
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
Ikke helt bra formulert, jeg glemte våre nordiske naboer... :) Jeg skal forandre .sigen snart.
So what have you done? Yes, you there behind the browser window. Have you done anything to lessen the power of the big companies? Have you done anything to, in whatever small way, discourage the usage of region-coding?
Here's a small tip. It is really a silly one, but yet. It is the only kind of pressure you can easily apply. I did this a few months ago, and it was really satisfying. If many people do it, things would change.
I went with my parents to buy them a DVD player. We went into a big TV/Video/DVD/Washing machines/Refrigerator/etc store, and started talking to one of their sales persons. We explained that we were interested in a DVD player. He showed us to the TV/Video department, and started showing us different players. He went on and on about the relative advantages of the different models, and just when we had homed in on this one model, just when he expected us to say "we'll take that one", I dropped the big question: "Of course it's region-free?" He got an anxious look to his face, and said "Well, no..." We looked very disappointed, and he did too. "Are any of these models region-free?" He looked even more sad than before "Well..., no... But really, you don't..." We just said "thanks" and went out of the store.
Next store, same story. And the next. When we had visited the five largest resellers of TV-related equipment in town, I felt like a king. At all five stores, the sales person looked like he had just lost his job when we left. After all, $200-$400 is rather a lot of money, even for a big store. And it showed clearly that they hadn't even thought about the possibility that region-freeness was a sales argument. They didn't know people wanted that. Now they did.
Luckily for my parents, at the sixth store they had a region-free DVD-player, and we bought that.
Now, if the sales persons at all these stores gets one potential buyer a month that leaves because the store does not carry region-free DVD-players, they don't care. If every sales person gets ten such customers a day, they'll do something about it. And Time-Warner and the others will hear about it too, after a while. Retailers will start to complain that they're losing customers due to the region-coding. Sony and the other big manufacturers will get pressure on them to have region-free models, which they can only do if Time-Warner and the others accept it. So they'll pressure Time-Warner to back off.
So what have you done to discourage region-coded DVD-players? The next time you pass a TV-store, pretend you want to buy a DVD-player. Let the sales person go on for a bit, and just when you have "decided" on a model, drop the killer line "It's region-free, of course?" When they have no region-free models, look very, very disappointed, and say something like "Oh, then I'm not interested. And that player looked so nice, so bad it's region coded." and leave. If they, by chance, do have a region-free model, just say that you're interested but that you'll have to think about it, and that you'll come back another day.
Remember, ten people every day could make a difference. Let's show them what we think.
Why, when you get to make a standard, would you make it *intentionally* incompatible everywhere? It's bad enough with TVs and cellphones, since the US and Europe consistently manage to pick different standards, but why do this when you *have* a choice?
I know this is about control and greed, and not about common sense. Therefore, why do we let these people make the standards? We need an independent group of experts deciding these things, a standards board releasing drafts, and companies implementing the drafts. Period. Also, there can be no patents held on the standards, or if there are patents, they can't be used to restrict an implementation of a draft or standard.
I don't care if this has to be a government regulated activity, or if it takes a little longer, (but not too much longer; that's why we need the drafts) but we can't let the corporations mess up important technology for their own personal gain. The web browser standards war was useless enough, and that didn't have nearly as much money riding on it.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think I found a registry entry that would let you change the region of your player, but mine is broken, so I can't test my theory... Anyone who wants to give it a shot, the key is:
C urrentVersion]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
"DVD_Region"
-- Gone Crazy, Back Later
Even if this rumor (and that's all I'm treating it as for now) is true, it won't change much. As has already been pointed out, players that can be manually switched to a given region, sometimes requiring a slight modification to do so (like my Pioneer DVL-909), will not be affected. And there were an awful lot of 909's sold in the US and overseas.
1 eng.htm
h tm
g ion_hack_2/DVD_Region_hack_2.shtml
I sometimes wonder if the studios in general, and Time-Warner in particular, aren't just posturing and saber-rattling. Are the studio execs so disconnected from reality that they don't think the people who want to will find a way around this? And any other barrier that they throw up, to try and restrict where a person can play a disc that they paid for out of their own pocket?
Ah, me... well, if there are any DVL-909 player owners Out There that would like to know how to do the region-switch mod (or some other interesting tweaks) on your unit, here are a couple of useful links.
NOTE: If you're not experienced with working on static-sensitive electronic equipment, and/or you don't have the right tools to do what's described on these sites (small-tip, temperature/ESD-controlled soldering station), AND you value your player, I suggest you avoid doing it yourself. These mods are not for the novice...
http://www.twi.ch/~i7eberha/eng/superhack/909-9
http://www.home-cinema.de/DVD_codefree/pioneer.
http://www.homecinemachoice.com/articles/DVD_Re
Enjoy! And, in doing so, silently tell the studios where they can stick their greedy, anti-consumer practices.
The American film industry tends to stagger theatrical release dates around the world, for reasons of economy. This way, a studio can strike one set of theatrical prints for a summer US release, and then ship those same prints to Europe for a Christmas release. They've operated like this for decades.
In the VHS era, the NTSC/PAL/SECAM video format differences were what protected this business model. DVD Region Coding was demanded by the studios to artificially maintain this technological bottleneck with the new, globally unified system.
Now, with region coding broken, a European (or Australian, or especially Kiwi) moviegoer can see the movie on DVD before they can see it in the theater. And get it cheaper to boot. If the consumer ends up on top (and you know we will, ultimately), the studios might have to start doing global releases all at one go! Or the more likely, and less pleasant scenario, is that they hold the DVD release until the world theatrical run is completed.
Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you! -- Bill Maher
This has been done before, a while ago -- I remember reading about it on several DVD sites. Sony has also came out with a similar technique to use against people who "chip" their PlayStations to play imported discs. (Unlike DVD, the PlayStation has only 3 regions: US, EU, and Japan.)
The algorithm is simple: the disc has software that can ask the player if a given region is valid, and the player will answer Yes or No. (The DVD scripting language allows this, so DVD movies are considered software in this sense.)
First generation hacks simply modified the player to answer Yes for all regions. So, if a disc only checks for one region and then plays the content if the answer is Yes, this will work. Almost all DVD's and PlayStation games work this way.
Recent discs annoy the customer in a more robust way. They also ask the player if a given region is valid, and the player must answer Yes. When this is done, however, the disc will ask the player about other regions as well. The player must answer No for these regions! If it simply blindly answers Yes for all regions, the disc knows the player has been hacked, and will refuse to play.
Second generation hacks work around this, by allowing the customer to choose a single region to make valid. The player will answer Yes for only that region, and No to all others. The disadvantage is that the customer must manually get involved and remember to change the region before playing discs from different regions. However, there is no current way for the disc to detect a hacked player when this is done, as it will appear in software to be completely valid (as it is restricted to a single region).
A good DVD player, like the Apex, will do both! When set to "BYPASS", it is a first generation hack. When set to any of the 8 region codes, it is a second generation hack.
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
I have the APEX "classic" too.
So the first thing that I did was turn off region.
I don't remember which discs(not Patriot or Giligans Perfect Storm), but a couple discs I watched checked for themselves if the disc id matched the player region. For these you have to set the player region to match.
Since I only currently have US discs, I just put set it to that.
So I good player would have to look at the disc and make the player region always match the disc.
Actualy your are both wrong. Great Britian is several islands. All of the English Isles, including Scotland and Ireland. The United Kingdom is what the first post should have said assuming he is speeking of the U.S.
Surely this means that players with a license purchased from the MPAA by the manufacturer to play region 1 discs, may not in fact be able to play region 1 disc.
Surely you could return such a player to the manufacturer or aftermarket supplier if the player did not, in fact, do what they said it would do?
I just hope that someone like the EU determines that region coding is an unfair trade restraint and bans the import of any region coded or encrypted DVDs at some point in the future.
Its bad enough that the US has to suffer from such ridiculous marketing, legal, and media industry practices, but to force the rest of the world to keep on having this crap shoved down our throats is really quite shitty indeed.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
The reels that are being projected in European theaters right now are actually the same strips of film that were shown in American theaters this summer.
Wrong. The sound is stored optically.
The cost of film duplication is a substantial chunk of the post-production budget of a movie.
DEM 2000 for Titanic (quite long), IIRC. Which is peanuts; one show in a large cinema will cover that.
Censorship on Slashdot
Then why the fsck are OLD movies on DVD
region coded!?
These have already been seen all over the world.
But it's the old movies that are hardest to find
in any region except 1.
Old movies on DVD are supposed to be region 0 (unlocked). But they aren't. Why?
I can happily watch english, french, spanish, portugese, and japanese OVs (among others) :)
Was the itention in joining europe and japan
to compensate us for the later releases?
:)
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
If you look at codefreedvd.com they already claim to have addressed this. You can actually set the player to emulate any specific region that that you want, so that these types of "protection" schemes will fail. It is interesting to see that discs can apparently interrogate the player. I don't know the details, but it looks like discs do have at least some software like functions on them.
I don't know if the differences in television standards were intentionally engineered, but they accomplish the same goal as region codes.
MSK
Ah, so that's why the "new" movies here in Europe are already so full of scratches...
Why do the movie and recording industries have so much trouble understanding? If people want to do something like watch any DVD or download music they will find a way. I really was hoping that the MPAA, DVDCCA, and studios where comming to realise that the regional encoding scheme is hurting sales outside of Region 1. They certainly didn't seem to be doing anything about it and I thought I'd noticed a trend in more simultaneous global movie releases. But alas, no, they were just looking for a way to tighten up a discs themselves - something that will be only partially effective and easy to bypass as others here have described. Despite the fact that the regional encoding scheme amounts to price fixing and is ethically wrong and even illegal is some places.
Seems like this region encoding thing should be challenged with a lawsuit.
Are there Europeans that are upset that region encoding makes the prices of US discs higher and the releases delayed? Unfair trade and price fixing is only natural with region encoding.
Or maybe a company like APEX or bigger should fight them in court.
Ok so you can't get big name DVDs from other countries. Is that a bad thing? Persoanlly I would love to see a good list of movies that are effected by this that create a problem for me in the USA that I could understand without any interpreter.
Respond to s
You charge different prices in different regions because you want to hit a different "sweet spot" when it comes to price/volume of the product in order to generate the most profit.
The only way you can do this is if you have control of the markets, and no competing products can come around to disturb that fact. You achive this by having dominating distribution and marketing, or through signing any one up who could create good content (movies in this case).
This means an imperfect market, where the "normal" laws of competition, supply and demand etcetera aren't working the way they should.
It's not necessarily a question of whether it's illegal or not (after all that depends on the legislation) or "immoral" or not, the outcome is worse movies at higher prices.
The technology behind this is old, and to my knowledge such dvds have been arround for some time now. Get th is straight: this won't break livid and even not all multi-region dvd players.
The point here is, that this new detection is just a code snippet inside the navigational code on the dvd. The navigational code is just some kind of program code which is interpreted by a dvd player. Apparently you can ask the dvd player about his country-code this way too, this was probably intended for multi-region dvds which could then present different menus etc. for different regions. As livid is not yet able to use the navigational code on the dvd, it is not affected by this. The raw mpeg data will not change and will still be playable. And of course, once livid is able to interpret navigation, it can tell the software the region code the software likes.
Same goes true for multi-region dvd players. Some of the smarter region-free-hacks will tell the player the appropiate region code. The new code could only detect players which has been set region-free by setting region code to zero, or by simply disabling the check done by the player itself. So if your player was hacked to play RC2, but still report itselfs as RC1, you will run into problems with the dvds described above.
but i repeat: this is not new. I heard about such code on dvds almost a year ago already. Typical fud from hollywood companies. This dumb move will change little to nothing.
What this sounds like is the disc has two sections. Section one is in bizarro region proteccted format - its a screenshot of "You have been bad" - returned when the DVD player asks for that section. Section two plays as normal on a hardwired region set. Hopefully thats all these are. Of course, it will probably work fine on anyone who has the 'menu pick a region' mod, as opposed to the 'ultra lazy query' mod.
Yay me!
It is rather easy to live with region codes, if you are for example an resident of the United States, given the fact, that the list of dvds available in the US is very much of a superset of what is available in other countries.
to say it clearly: you might simply not be able to get a dvd in your own region code, if you are not in region 1.
i would love to support my local distributors, dealers etc., but if they simple do not release a movie in my country / region (here=europe), i can not do much other than importing a rc 1 one dvd. This is clearly still morally much better than just going the easy way, avoid the extra costs for international shipping and taxes, and get a divx type copy of the movie. This way i can support great movies. If the companies want to prevent me from doing that, they will simply cut of their own revenue. I wonder how dumb you can be and still successfull operate a multinational business like big movie studio.
Who said what country he was in?
-- no
As with so many things discussed on Slashdot these days, everybody seems to assume that region codes are a tool used by Big Business to torment Real People. (That's the whole purpose of Big Business, of course... making money and providing jobs is just a bonus.)
I'm not going to try to tell you that region codes are a good thing for the consumer, but let me just explain what region codes are for, from a (relatively) objective standpoint.
Big movies typically get released in the U.S. first. After a few months, they move to Europe... a few months after that, they trickle down to the rest of the world. By the time a movie has its theatrical premiere in Europe or Asia, it has often been released in America on video or DVD. If Europeans can chose between renting a new movie for $4 and seeing it in theaters for perhaps $70 (for a whole family,) a whole lot of them are going to skip the theaters. That kind of defeats the purpose of a theatrical release... hence region codes.
Now, the next question is, why doesn't Big Business just release the movie everywhere at the same time? That's another evil conspiracy, right? No. Copying a film is not like copying an MP3. Copying a film is hard. The cost of film duplication is a substantial chunk of the post-production budget of a movie.* Furthermore, you can only copy a film master so many times before it disintegrates. The reels that are being projected in European theaters right now are actually the same strips of film that were shown in American theaters this summer. Simultaneous worldwide release is just not feasible with film. (Digital projection may change all this, of course.)
So, that's the story on region codes. I'm not going to pass judgement on whether they're good or evil (they certainly annoy me), but it's always good to know the other side of the story.
* Some actual numbers would be nice here. Anyone?
MSK
If we used players that'd switch regions on choice, wouldn't the data get all skewed and make DVD's hard to get in America?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
A home theatre is good for watching movies you enjoyed first in a movie theatre.
Existing DVD players could be modified to work around this.
Note: The Latin-derived word meaning "to work around" is "circumvent."
New DVD players can be designed to work around this.
Note: The region coding system is an access control system under the DMCA.
Software which runs on general-purpose computers (e.g. livid) can easily be modified to circumvent this.
Note: The DMCA prohibits circumventing the region coding system.
Don't count on getting the DMCA thrown out; the judges and senators have already been bought.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
United States dollars work only in the United States. You could say that they're "region coded" too.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
As a citizen of Norway, I have to wait approx. 3/4 year for American movies to come out on DVD after they are released in the US. I think that sucks! And so does everybody else here, so they order from the US. But what about the Zones? Good question! Nobody (sic) here cares. I haven't ever seen a DVD player that has the zone system intact here. Every store, including the big chains, have to advertise with zone-free players or else they can't sell any! If the player isn't modified from the import agency, they do it at the store or ship it off to a repair shop that modifies it. Personally, I have a Harman / Kardon DVD-player that is zone-free from the factory (You just enter Pi with 6 digits and the zone to emulate or 0 for zone free).
You know, I for one would really like to know how they can change the encyption without breaking compatibility with all existing DVD players.
Having to buy a second DVD player to play Time Warner DVDs is going to make it really obvious to the average person that access control is bad
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
I can't believe you led everyone on like that and got moderated up for it. You told all of us that you purchased a region free dvd player, but you didn't tell us which model. I'm hurt. I can't believe you'd hate me enough to hurt me like that. *sniff*
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
It has **always** been possible to author DVD disc so that they would not play in region 0 (multi-region) players. This is old news that people are blowing out of proportion as usual on Slashdot.
As previously mentioned, there are "region 0" [sic] players that DVD discs with this encoding will detect and refuse to play on. These are an attempt to make automatic region selectable players.
There are also region-selectable players that can have their region changed manually to any of the existing regions. There is no way DVD discs can detect this.
I should know, I write embedded software for DVD players.
Now, it is certainly true that not all discs by a long shot bother to attempt to detect "region 0" players, and disc "security" will increase if more discs are authored in this way, but it's really no big deal.
don't current dvds use an encryption scheme other than css now? so doesn't that mean that those dvd players are slightly more versatile than we think?
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
This is actually a very good thing to do. As viktor suggests, it gives a great deal of satisfaction to tell them that they aren't stocking what you want. However, pick a senior sales assistant so that your message is more likely to be passed upwards.
I do the same thing when shopping for the DVDs themselves, as I already have a region-free player. The UK is in Region 2, so first of all I ask for a movie that I know is available only in R1, then another, and maybe another. Finally, I ask for one that I know is available in R2 version but cut by the censors or containing fewer features, and when they happily bring it out, beaming with success, I tell them why this version is substandard, and leave.
The end result is probably nil, but it's definitely satisfying. And you never know, maybe a tiny part of the message is getting through.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I am wondering what sort of impact this will have on New Zealand DVD consumers, as it is illiegal there to sell regionalized DVD players (its a free trade law or something). If NZ was big enough i wouldnt mind seeing them take legal action against any DVD distributer Attempting this. If only i knew what that law that stops the region encoding was, then we need to all petition the EU and US to follow NZ lead.
I care. I don't want to have to be a minor victem in the market. They are finding it easier and easier to drop segments of that market.
If regions were really used I would not be able to get movies produced and distributed in Hungry and play them here, without getting more than one DVD player.
What would happen if I wanted other movies that never made it to the US. I guess that would only be the less import, like me, that would be effected.
-- James
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri