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Consumer Friendly (or Disney Hostile) DVD Players?
solli asks: "After 13 years of relatively faithful service my Mitsubishi(!) VCR has finally kicked the bucket, and I am now thinking of moving on to DVDs. One of the only things preventing me from buying a DVD is the fact that some media companies like to make you watch FBI warnings, trailers, and ads before allowing you to view the actual movie (like Disney's Tarzan). Of course, there is such a large demand for region free players and other specialized needs that niche markets have developed to fill that demand. However, I have seen nothing about players that give you the freedom to navigate through the disk the way you want to, instead of how the content producer wants you to. What DVD players exist that let the viewer take full advantage of the nonlinear properties of the DVD media? Can any of the available players ignore the directives embedded on-disk to disable certain controls at particular times?"
You can always try picking up one of the old APex AD 600 Players. Macrovision disabled, Region free.
These guys supply premodded DVD players, I bought my Panasonic from here last Christmas. Apart from the long delivery time, they were perfect.
Mine has the fastforwarding through trailers/warnings, region free, and is demacrovisioned.
They also have the option that (if you're a bit scared of soldiering inside your new £400 gadget like me) you can send them your DVD player and they'll chip it for you, of course if they screw up they pay for it (when I bought mine at least, may have changed now).
Some sony players can be flased with a modified firmware that disables region coding and the UOPs.
Here is a page with a patch for the firmware of the Sony DVP-S7000 DVD Player.
Jan
Of course, I have had my player about 2 years at least.
Here
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
12 seconds?
I never heard ~10 minutes called 12 seconds. Tarzan has the previews on that unskippable track
....is a site that has lots of players
----- One piece short of Legoland
videolan is good, but i prefer ogle. menus work flawlessly and, like videolan, no fbi bs
Just go to the chapter menu and start watching from Chapter 1. The FBI warning's usually fixed between the main menu's play option and the first chapter. Skipping direct to the chapter usually skips the warning.
I have one, my sister has one, my neighbors bought one after I told them about it (they were also looking for one).
There is firmware available to make it Macrovision Free, Region Free, and RCE Immune(sp).
I did it to all three players, no problem.
Best part? They all work very well, and are dirt cheap ($60-80).
http://www.angryburrito.com/ The best, completely unfinished software review site ever.
It's been discontinued for a bit, but Philips' DVD825/DVD825AT gladly allow you to fire up fast forward to skip through "remote lockout" content.
On the plus side, many of their other DVD players offer the same functionality. If there's a major company out there that's friendlier than most to consumers, it's Philips.
You can get a cheap HTPC (home theater PC) setup if you have a vid card with TV out and a software DVD player that can disable Macrovision and region encoding, but the quality is not up there. Personally, I'd recommend getting a Realmagic Xcard with remote from (www.sigmadesigns.com). It's a hardware MPEG-1/-2/-4 decoder, and it has S-video and digital coaxial sound output, and it comes with a S-video to component cable to free up an S-video input on your TV. I'd couple this with a nifty tool called Remote Selector (www.remoteselector.com) which makes the Xcard and other hardware DVD decoders region free, macrovision free, and disables user prohibition (I.E. skipping FBI warnings and studio intros).
All of these work on some discs, but not all discs. Your results may vary, but they've all worked for me on various DVDs.
1. Hit stop twice and then hit play. This may bring you to the beginning of the movie.
2. Some "protected" sequences only protect against "fast forward" or "skip forward" but not both. Try both, and both menu buttons.
3. Some DVD players allow you to skip directly to the title and chapter of your choice. My Toshiba does.
4. Some DVD players allow you to disable the menus entirely (PBC off.) Again, my Toshiba does, and many HK players do too. Look in the config menu.
Hope these help.
I purchased an Apex AD-703 a little over a year ago and it was the best (and most lucky) purchase I've ever made.
What puts Apex above the rest is the ability to flash update the BIOS of the player. There are
many,
many resources for hacking the Apex BIOS. This includes a great utility that's been developed called
EZ Patch which allows users to create custom BIOS images for their APEX players. Among the many modules for EX Patch is the ability to make the player region free and the ability to bypass the "locks" on DVDs that keep a user from skipping over the previews and other such items.
No somehow about it, it's easy to tell which track is the main film, it's always the largest vob stream. On DVDs at this point, the movie is always stored seperate from all the other shit. You just load that vob stream and play it.
those 10 seconds of fbi warnings are so costly aren't they.
...And just as necessary. Do we *really* need
a reminder, every time we watch a movie, about
all the rights we lack with respect to it?
I think we all understand the idea fairly
well...
How many audio CDs do you have that start each track with "Federal law provides severe penalties..." and won't let you FF through it? Zero? That about sums up *my* count, and yet, I *still* understand that copying CDs to give to all my friends breaks the law. Freaky, eh?
Honestly, though, the FBI warnings don't bother me so much as the damned ads. If I *buy* a movie, why do I have ads on it? Presumeably ads justify our "free" TV reception, so how do they belong on a DVD I purchase? *That* really pisses me off, and I would not even *consider* owning a player that honors a button lockout, forcing me to watch them.
besides there really isn't any "better" way to access content on a dvd.
Yes, actually, better ways *do* exist, which seems to me like exactly what the original poster here requested. I've seen a few comments on players that ignore software button lockouts, ways to rip-and-reburn DVDs to get right to the point, ways to just do it all in software with a DVI-out video card, and a host of other ideas. So yes, "better" ways *do* exist.
Personally, I back-up all my DVDs to MPEG4 (WITHOUT including the FBI warning and ads), then lose them in a drawer somewhere (the same drawer as my obsolete-physical-audio-CD collection, incidentally). They look better on my monitor than my TV anyway, and I have a million choices of players with more features than I could ever use. And, if I want to just watch one scene of a movie, I don't have to actually figure out where I left the disc, if I've loaned it to a friend, if the dog ate it, whatever. I have it on my file server, just waiting for me to watch it at the touch of a button. I pop it open, move the slider to the scene I want, and I've found and finished watching the scene I want in less time than I could have gotten the actual movie playing in a physical player.
When I was a little kid these tags definitely did not include the phrase "except by the consumer" and I remember being puzzled enough to ask my parents how such a prohibition could be valid! The all-important qualification must have been added sometime in the last few decades, so I imagine many Slashdotters still remember the old tag.
Wow, it sounds like you really have a need to justify your Apex purchase. I really don't get how you surmised that the prior poster was "16" because they stated that APEX players have questionable quality: Sounds like a fair statement to me (though I am not substantiating it: I know no one with an APEX).
Regarding your ridiculous pro-Apex claims, I have a 4 year old Pioneer deck that plays VCDs, and has no problem with CD-Rs or CD-RWs. Virtually any desk sold in the past year plays MP3s. I have never, ever had the need to play a non-region 1 DVD (I'm not really a fan of Japanimation : It all seems a tad too pedophilic), so I really don't see the value there. My upcoming purchase of a replacement will be a Toshiba progressive scan player with every feature (including Windows Media playback, though I know that that feature won't go over well on Slashdot) for ~$168 US : I really don't see the value in going with a hack shop.
I've had my Apex for about three years now, still works just fine. It (model 600) uses a standard computer DVD drive, so if that ever breaks I'll just swap it out. I did open it up and put heat sink grease between the sinks and the two chips that run hot, and added a small CPU fan in there to help keep things cooler. Nothing your average slashdotter couldn't do.
-- Alastair
I have no idea what UOP stands for (User Operation Permittance? ). In any case, I think the latest hacked Sampo DVD Player firmware (also useable in most of the Apex models) includes a UOP hack. I'm running it on my Apex 660 and can skip directly to the main menu while the FBI warning (or all those friggin ads on the Disney discs) is up. It's WONDERFUL.
And of course, you can disable macrovision, play MP3s (with a much better menu than the original Apex firmware), display JPG images, hook up a hard drive or compact flash unit, play discs from any region, etc. Check out the Nerd-Out forums HERE!
I just picked up a Malata DVP-520. Great player. It is region free and you can set a region for the new discs that check. It does the best PAL to NTSC conversion of any player even close to its price ($250ish). A major feature of the PAL conversion is that it keeps the correct aspect ratio. It lets you zoom, stretch, pan, etc everything. It also plays MP3s, VCDs, and SVCDs.
I love it. Oh yeah, it's progressive scan too.
>... what the deal is with region coding?
Other way round - it protects the distribution monopolies out in the non-US regions. If region coding weren't in place those of us in places like Australia would just order new releases from wherever was cheapest, probably through the web from the US, and local distributors would likely collapse.
With region coding in place, the idea is that we're forced to buy DVD's from local distributors, which are released on their schedule and at their price point.
This isn't new - in about '94/'95 my boss at the time ordered laserdiscs from the US. They were stopped at the border because the discs hadn't come through the official release channels and weren't officially available in NZ. (They were just regular Hollywood movies).
You can remove a lot of stuff that you don't need... additional languages, subtitles, other misc. tracks (like commentary), deleted scenes, etc. I usually watch the "extras" once for every 5-6 times I watch a movie. I never use the extra language tracks, and I only watch commentary on DVDs where I expect it to be entertaining (as opposed to commentary that is almost exclusively devoted to the filmography, which I'm not interested in).
When you consider all this that you can remove, you can almost always fit a single DVD movie onto the 4.7g available to DVD-Rs.
check out the Region Codes page over at OpenDVD.org for a fairly good explanation.
1.Make sure you have a reasonable computer with tv-out (the price difference between a Geforce 2 MX with tv-out and one with it is negligible)
2. Buy DVD drive. (I have a pioneer DVD-116, although anything will do)
3.Patch the firmware to make it region-free. http://firmware.inmatrix.com/
4.Install xine, mplayer, ogle, vlc, etc
5.Play!
Totally legal (at least here in New Zealand) and ethical. I don't think that I've read an fbi warning while using xine.
BTW, does anyone know how to get the old xine gui skin? Will grabbing an old xine-ui tarball and taking the skin from that do?
-gunkaaa
I have a Sampo DVE611 - it's cheap and a fairly decent player. It's region-free (you can set the region). You can't fast-forward over the legal boilerplate, but you can hit 'next' to advance straight to the 'root' menu. Also handles MP3, VCD, and SVCD. It's got video, S-Video, and three plug (component?) output. It also has a screen saver (bouncing logo). Got it mail-order from 'Barrel of Monkeys'.
[Insert pithy quote here]
It might sound surprising, but my Onkyo DV-S353 lets me skip right past the warnings and all. I just pop the disc in and hit the menu button as soon as the warning / trailers / other annoying things come on.
Okay, so it is region locked, but you don't have to wait and you get a nice picture and sound without buying too expensive of a player.
(Oh, the bad news is that it doesn't appear to play anything on CDRs, unlike my old Apex.)
I've always just made up some crap to write on the card (not my real name or address--are you kidding?) and they've given me the card no problem. I told them flat out that the info I was giving them was false and they didn't care. They're store clerks who work for a living and they don't like the corporate idiots trying to collect this personal info any more than you or I do.
The JVC XV-S500BK and XV-S502SL (they're the same player, but the 500BK is black and the 502SL is silver) will let you skip non-skippable areas. As a bonus, it also plays VCD, SVCD and MP3. It will display JPEG's on a CD, but very slowly. It will supposedly play PAL discs on NTSC televisions, but I haven't gotten around to testing this yet. There isn't yet a regionless hack for it. But my fingers are crossed. You can pick it up for ~$180 at any retail shop. Sometimes online for less.
But with my Sony, I can get around most of the FBI warnings, "mandatory previews", and other annoying features. Even though you may not be able to hit "next" all of the time, between trying the "title", "next", "menu", and as a last resort, the fast-forward buttons, most of them can be passed up.
Now if they just weren't there at all, now THAT would be nice.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Two huge examples of why region-free DVD players are great: the UK only (Region 2) DVD sets of the complete first seasons of Family Guy and Futurama.I N/B00005UWN O
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/AS
Due to syndication issues and other Fox f*ckery, god knows when they might be released in the US.......
I just yesterday finished with the same problem.
Here is a post I made about this
I have bought a new DVD-Player which
has all the features I need. The Grundig GDV130 (a TYT / Scan2000 Clone).
Read about it here:
German
English
My personal experience with flashing that player: (only in german) here
There is a forum on Yahoo-Groups for the Scan2000/TYT Clones here. You need the latest Firmware and a tool called GSK2 from the files Section.
With that tool you can make the Firmware Macrovision free AND Turn of User Prohibition.
So now you can switch off subtitles which you sometimes aren't allowed, you can go directly to the Title-Menu. It's really neat.
My new Grundig GDV130 DVD Player now has these cool features:
- Regionfree (Remote-Control Code)
- Macrovision Free (thru the new Firmware)
- No User Prohibitions (I can now switch of those subtitles, or go directly
to the title-menu without watching those nasty copyright notices)
- Good SVCD/VCD Playback
- CVD (China VCD Subtitles) with SVCD
Cheers
-- MicAttAck
Religon is an insult to human dignity.
They have been online for several years to my knowledge, and the site seems regularly updated.
They do their own mods, which instead of changing regions on the fly, allows you to select the region with a single keypress. This means that they tend to be slightly more pricey than a vanilla system.
They also do macrovision disabled (a technology which prohibits use in home projection systems) and they do FBI warning disabled (the point of the original question).
Codefreedvd is the site, using Google gets you exactly what you want, for example this 300 dvd sony (for UK power supply). They do ship around the world, you'll have to search for your own specs.
Murky
A wannabe geek with no money to geek with.
You're quoting a player requirement. The disc is not required to use UOP control, as in the original post.
I have a copy.
-Dave
Recent models have dropped support for Video CDs, and this is rumored to have been because of pressure from Sony. (Why Sony would pressure this, I do not know.) However, Super Video CDs play fine.