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Time Warner To Change DVD Region Coding System?

Posted by Hemos on from the maybe-could-be dept.

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?

4 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. Clever idea--easy to bypass by crow · · Score: 5

    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!

  2. Fatal Flaw by Jeffrey+Baker · · Score: 5
    There is an obvious fatal flaw in this new region encoding scheme. The Warner Home Video memo states that:
    In simple language, the RCE allows the disc to detect if a hardware player is region specific (as required by the CSS licensing agreement), or if it has been manufactured or altered in the market to be "region free".

    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.

  3. this is no big deal by rgrimm · · Score: 4

    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.

  4. Subversive tactics. by viktor · · Score: 5
    If Time Warner wants to make sure that the foul trick of region-coding actually works, who's going to stop them? Frankly, the readers of Slashdot can't be the only people in the world who find the region-coding awful. But Time-Warner are so big that they have the power to do exactly what they want. The only people that can stop them are their customers. Politicians no longer have much power over the really huge corporations.

    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.