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?"

Comments

Apex AD600

[Dystopium]

You can always try picking up one of the old APex AD 600 Players. Macrovision disabled, Region free.

Re:Apex AD600

[Goldberg's Pants]

Actually, a lot of the AD1500's from WalMart are hackable. You need to check the serial number (you can find stuff on the net about it.)

I got an AD1500 in January and it was software moddable (get the wrong serial number on it, and it's a hardware mod unfortunately). Burn the rom to a CD, stick it in the player, it whirrs, flashes the rom, ejects the disk. Bingo. Region free, no Macro etc... Google is your friend.

Best part about Apex? Very cheap, and yet one of the few DVD players on the market that can play PAL DVD's on an NTSC TV. I know, I've done it.

Re:Apex AD600

[13Echo]

I have an Apex AD660, that was "upgradable" with a simple ISO CDR image. I can't complain about the player. It has been running great for over 2 years now. I have firends that have had the AD600A models even longer, and all are running without problems. Wal-Mart stores have the players for about $70 or so for the cheapest models. You really can't beat them. They are truely the best bang-for-buck in a DVD player. They are also the most hackable.

Check out Nerd-Out for all of the info that you could ever want on the Apex and similar players.

I am not sure that there is a DVD player in existance that does what you wnat it to do, but the Apex players are the closest things possible.

Re:Apex AD600

[BRTB]

Apex AD1100-W's are great and $65 at Wal-mart.

If you can find the 1meg-ROM unit you can reflash it to be MV and region free; the more common 512k-ROM just has the region-free hack right now but the MV fix is in the works. [check the Nerd-Out forums - AD1100 section, pinned topic at the top] All the DVD's I've used on it, the thing just skips everything you tell it to. Even the sometimes annoyingly-long intros on play menus - don't have to wait for it to come up, press play and it actually PLAYS.

And it has some other nice features: plays MP3s, VCDs, SVCDs, and it'll even show you a CD full of JPEGs. There have even been reports it'll show you raw MPEG files burned to CD (haven't tried that one yet).

No I don't work for Apex, but a box that'll do all that for cheap is a pretty good deal. (Sorry, no component outputs, progressive scan or optical digital out [does have coax], but what do you want for $65?)

Premodded players

[slug359]

An excellent site for those of us living in the UK is http://www.techtronics.com/.
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 player can be modified

[tempmpi]

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.

Even better..

[decaying]

....is a site that has lots of players

Possible solutions.

[Kufat]

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.

Why not?

[pla]

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.

store cards aren't that big a deal

[splorf]

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.

No UserProhibitions: Grundig GDV130/TYT/Scan2000

[MicAttAck]

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

CodefreeDVD also do FBI disabled....

[murk1e]

I don't work for these people, not did I buy a DVD player from them (I gave my business to a local supplier).

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.