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No Region Codes for HD-DVD?
MBCook writes "According to Engadget something interesting has come out of the DVD Forum Conference 2005 in Japan. Here is the line from the post we've all been waiting for: 'But one statement from Toshiba Digital Media Networks' Hisashi Yamada was particularly intriguing: "We've gotten a variety of opinions about region controls. Even in the Steering Committee, they are extremely unpopular; we decided to not put them in. HD DVD probably won't contain any region playback controls."' Source: Japanese, English (via Google's Language Tools)."
If Blu-Ray doesn't match this, I think Toshiba just got a LOT more popular.
Does this mean we can import and play the HD-DVDs of movies that have yet to come out in the theatre here in Europe? (without special hardware)
I wonder what the movie industry thinks about this.
Poor argument - it could easily be made (more) illegal, and hardware manufactures told not to add region-hacking codes in the firmware.
at least one copy can be made to an electronic format, and no region encoding? sweet!!!
I hope Apple jumps on this because then they could have all they need for a video iPod
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Japanese English?
-DB-
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Looks like the competition between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD may benefit consumers in the end after all. Now let's see what Sony offers the consumer with Blu-Ray to convince us to go with them first.
...is that they're not supplying region code "functionality" because region codes definitely have increased piracy as a whole. When someone in a given country can't get a DVD because its not available in their market yet, they'll more likely just download the movie.
Region coding worked fine before information traveled so fast and so easily. You'll also see European release dates much closer to the U.S. release dates for the same reason -- if the movie isn't in theatres in your market, just download a bootleg and see it first.
Here again is another proof that information not only wants to be free, it wants to be available to everyone at the same time.
I've always found it interesting how region coding was giving an advantage to Hollywood movies. Everything out of Hollywood, even the least interesting tripe, gets released in other region codes than north America, notably in the Europe/Japan zone (2). On the other hand, only a relatively few movies from Europe and Japan get an "American release" on Zone 1 DVDs. Hence the zoning works as a one-way filter and keeps American consumers from most foreign movies.
The theater release date argument toward zoning is not good because more and more of the most anticipated movies have worldwide release, and also because then why would zoning apply to old classics and other pre-dvd era movies that are still to be released ?
And the people rejoiced.
And the movie industry rejected HD-DVD.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
DRM is even more unpopular but it's being used even more.
Region codes may seem ridiculous and bothersome to the consumer, but it prevents us from ordering movies and games from less well off places where they're sold for maybe $2 instead of paying $10-$20 here. Unless the studios are willing to release material with a global price of 20 US dollars it's not going to happen. Or maybe they'll just change the name, it won't be called "region codes" by name but there will be something in place to restrict the playing of foreign movies and games. There's just too much money involved to scrap it.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
Obviously, it could just be a case of HDDVD seeing how unpopular they are and making some changes to their strategy late in the day to get some support which they wouldn't have done if we hadn't originally shunned them.
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Who is this 'most of us'? Last time I checked only an extreme minority 'hacked' anything electronic.
what, blue-laser disks aren't serialized that way?!
Although many people point to release dates and argue that regions were to prevent someone from importing a movie that was still in local theatres, I think a much larger factor was the general standard of living. Region coding allowed the studios to charge higher prices in regions that had higher standards of living without pricing themselves out of the market in economically depressed regions.
What I want in a DVD player (or any movie player):
I managed to get a DVD player that can do the first two (it also does PAL->NTSC conversion), but not the last (and I actually have an old TV with only coax input, so I must run the DVD (at the time, the DVD only had RCA analog out) through a VHS player which doesn't work due to Macrovision; I've been bitten and I wasn't even trying to copy... luckily I also have an old VHS player that doesn't have auto-tracking, woohoo).
I absolutely abhor shopping for these things because it's such an effort to do the research and find something that works how I want it to. It's tough being a discerning shopper. Is there a DVD player that can skip "non-skippable" things? Can I do this from Linux (in which case, is there a DVD drive that is region free? I assume Macrovision isn't an issue... even if I were to record analog with a VHS deck...).
So, yay to no region codes, but to the current DVD player shopping: AAAAAAAAAAAH!! #%$@!
Most DVD players in the Uk (especially the cheap ones) do not ship region free, but there is normally a very easy way (if you can find it) to make it region free. My DVD player can be made region free (or any other region) by using a hidden menu which is accessed by pressing 7 when the tray is open.
Lots of examples of how easy it is are available here http://www.dvdexploder.com/multihacks.htm
Avtar
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Toshiba might well make HD-DVD region free, but don't expect Sony and Co to do the same with Blu-Ray. Sony will never implement a totally region free video format. I think even the UMD discs have region encoding.
I was rooting for Blu-Ray, on the simple basis of higher technical standards. But now HD-DVD is offering me a lot more choice, and most likely lower cost imports. I've just been converted to the HD-DVD camp and all it took was one press release.
See Sony. Consumers like it when you don't cripple their hardware with restrictions.
May the Maths Be with you!
RIAA Sues All Attendees of DVD Forum Conference 2005
well it theoretically has less storage space.
that's about all it has less than bluray.
both formats are anti-"consumer" and not worth buying into in the long run.
any format where the user/customer/owner doesn't have full access isn't worth the atoms it's made out of.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Most of "us" just pretend "we" are hackers on /. whereas "we" are really clueless. We just run programs real hackers have written.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Also, most of us can hack, and hacking DVD BIOS/software/players is pretty straightforward.
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Or in the USA for $20 and in the UK for £20 ($38).
The problem is, a lot of people travel between regions, and when their DVD player wont play the DVDs they bought somewhere else, they complain to the drive manufacturer and the disk seller.
Its beginning to dawn on some people that slapping your customer round the face with a wet fish is not good business practice.
Have you explained region codes to your mother today?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Why didn't you just buy a DVD player at the same time? A cheap one only costs as much as 2 or 3 DVDs, and more or less every DVD player for sale in the UK is either region-free, or can be made so after a couple of minutes search on google.
As far as I can tell from this discussion, this region coding crap is still enforced in the US. But it is certainly not enforced over here.
I'm in the middle of moving with my family from Europe to the United States. Besides the fact that things with electrical outlets won't work as everybody knows -- the very idea that I can't view my purchased movies I bought in this European country to play on my DVD player in the United States is absolutely ludicrous. It's not in a different "voltage", it's just a simple friggin' MPEG-file on a piece of plastic!
Worse is that if I would ask around where to make my American DVD player region free they wouldn't help me due to the DMCA.
Region codes were flawed from the start: It's not the discs that should be region locked, it ought be the DVD player. And it's not the DVD player that you should have changeable regions, it ought be the discs. We'd still have regions just like the movie companies want us to have -- but at least we'd be able to move from one continent to another and still use our completely legitimately purchased wares.
But alas, since this is impossible due to obvious technological limitations, we ended up with this half-assed excuse we have today.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
There are watermarks that survive microphone+cam recording in theaters. If it can survive that, I'm pretty sure it would survive a re-encoding. If someone put enough time in, theoretically the watermark could probably be disturbed though.
I fully expect at some point in time every disc you buy will have a unique watermark and will be somehow attached to your credit card at purchase so that the only way to get around it is to buy in cash or shoplift, even then theyll still know which disk it originated from and likely pin it to the ip it first came from.
I hope that answers your question.
Being a person that travels reguarly between North America, Europe and occasionally Africa, i can attest to you that DVD region codes have always been entirely pointless. The two main reasons region codes were implemented was A) to control movie/dvd release timings in various parts of the world and B) to prevent people from purchasing cheaper versions of DVDs from foreign countries.
In actuality, neither of the above two have actually occured for the following reasons:
The majority of the people that complain about region codes are (excluding those guys that love their asian porn and japanimation) people that travel and move between different continents. Anyone that does falls into either of these groups, already has a DVD player that ignores region codes...thus making them pointless.
People who just can't wait to watch a movie that has come out in another part of the world will find a way to watch it regardless....generally by downloading a movie off some p2p network.
The above to points together make argument A entirely moot.
Arguement B is entirely disproven by a combination of factors as well. The following facts are true: Many people do not have faith in the internet and thus are very sceptical about ordering stuff online...much less from a website in asia/south-east asia where dollars signs are replayed by little Y's with lines through them. Americans are lazy, they'd rather buy DVDs at walmart at the same time they get their size 60, Route 66 pants. If a person doesn't want to pay 15 dollars for a DVD, there are much easier alternatives than ordering Moulin Rouge (Mombay Edition) over the internet; you can walk (i mean drive...forgot this was america) to your cities local china town where 'buy 3 DVDs get 10' offers appear on every corner. Generally, no one is going to order dvd's from foreign countries.
Im greatly looking forward to HD-DVDs not having region locking. as for blu-ray....its gonna end up like every other piece of sony technology (Mini discs, magic gate memory, UMD, etc) -> proprietary and dead.
simpler solution, don't expect ANYTHING from sony hardware. many won't play CD-R or DVD+/-R despite being made wll after CDR was popular
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
For DVDs, hacking is actually more widespread and accepted than in most other areas. Even in your average electronics supermarket, you could find offers of making DVDs region free, just as getting a stand to your tv or cables to the dvd. At least that has been the case the last few years here in Sweden. I think the companies have recognized that, the people willing to go through the trouble importing discs, wouldn't mind the minor hassle of breaking the region coding. What they have proposed though, could be used to implement a much stronger protection for them. By requiring an online validation system they actually can stop a disc bought in one country to be used in another country. So they do not have region codes as we know them now, but in effect keep the market segmentation in place, with a much stronger system.
This is just the nail in HD-DVD's coffin. The studios are now going to flock straight to Blu-Ray with this announcement. Sucks but true.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Now that Mod Chips Are Legal who really cares about region codes? just wait for the DVD player mod chip!
----- Concentrate on promoting more than demoting.
Major movies like the Matrix have made a big point of doing world-wide releases. Region coding was a bad idea, the consumers lose and the studios don't actually gain much of anything for it. Maybe it stopped a few people from ordering cheap DVD's from abroad. But really, those people who would would also be the people who knew how to bypass the coding anyway.
It solved a problem that didn't really exsist and probably actually ended up costing the studios in lost revenue for potential niche markets.
Quack, quack.
When I watched that movie, I wondered, "What are effects of digital media on analog evil". For example, when I watched the movie it was on DVD. Therefore, a copy was more than likely made in various caches in the system. Does that inhibit the evil on the VHS from attacking me? Or even at a more fundamental level, did the evil even survive the MPEG2 compression? Can any evil survive digitation?
What about internet distribution? Does copying a DivX file grant you immunity? Do the router owner's between you and another computer gain immunity, even though they are not aware of the copy.
Somebody needs to do their Ph.D. dissertation on this subject.