DVD regions

Great business model, make people afraid to buy your products!

I seem to recall there being a Flash memory that holds the region and there being utilities that will let you change it. There might be a region code that lets you play any region. It's been a while since I bothered messing with optical disks. I watch stuff online and if I can't get it through le git channels there are many ways to download nearly anything you want other than Downton Abbey perhaps. PBS has really locked that down!

Where are you located? Many cheap DVD players sold in the UK supermarkets can be chipped to be region free if you search online. As sold they are legal but they are easy enough to make region free. It used to be that you needed to talk to a man in London to get chipped region free players but they are just about everywhere these days.

NASA went to London to get the ISS DVD players chipped.

The usual run of PC drives were shipped able to change region once or twice, but would then freeze forever in the chosen region. It is possible to get a bunch of external DVD drives, and just do region-change on a drive every time a new-region item is to be played...

In the early days, Apple's data DVD drives wouldn't play ANY videos, unless the video card paired with it was the special type that had the firmware/software to do the video-decode task.

An acquaintance who made lots of trips to Italy was unhappy that her laptop wouldn't play European videos; the only easy solution was for her to buy a spare (removable-bay) DVD drive to program for the European region.

Consumer drives had other input options (not in the user manual) for switching, but basically the consumer market quickly rewarded drives that supported a way to hack them for universal region acceptance. Licensed DVD player manufacturing, though, still has region limitation as far as I know.

I don't know how they thought this system would have a net benefit, as if pirates can't buy players for different regions.

Thanks. I found a utility but can't test it until I get some discs. The BBC really drops the ball on publishing stuff for the US.

I don't see why Downton Abbey is more popular than other Masterpiece Theater series, or why it's handled differently. Even Danger UXB and I Claudius are on youtube.

I'm in the US.

What do they change? Flash firmware? CPU with ROM?

I hope they took the NASA soldering course.

it was to stop consumers buying dvd in cheap regions, or getting the dvd before it premiered in theaters

There's a little more to it than that; the movie producers wouldn't sign up to produce the products unless they got the 'distribution rights control' feature. They didn't have to do their own foreign marketing; the region-controlled disks gave the licensed Asian distributor an incentive to advertise/promote knowing that only their Asian outlets had locally usable "Toy Story 5" product.

and Americans couldn't just import DVDs from a region where they were sold for a fraction of the price

That's what the concensus was at the the time, to protect home market profits, charging what they could get away with elsewhere and keeping costs down for poorer societies.

All about greed and profit at core, but for any such tech fix, there will always be a way to break it. Wasn't there a linux driver that got the authors sued ?. Years ago now though...

Chris

How much is a DVD set of either? Downton Abbey is $100+. I'm sure that's all it is. They see this as a big money maker. I believe in the US PBS go t cut off from a lot of federal funding and need to scrape every penny they can. But the series isn't owned by PBS, in fact I read that their license to air the shows ended in June of this year.

Yes, that was the one...

Chris

The ones I've encountered were done by pressing buttons on the remote to select "region 0", there was a passcode to access the hidden region selection menu. there were no actual hardware mods needed.

I can't vouch for this site but it might give him some generic consumer model numbers to look for. UK led the world in this game because a lot of film buffs like to watch movies when they first come out in the USA.

But many of the ones sold in supermarkets can have a magic sequence typed in on the remote control to disable region locking. It is actually a selling point (though how many use it I don't know).

I guess Amazon UK might not be willing to sell you one.

Amazon US appear to have them as well...