I hate DVD region encoding.
When I was fixing my old DVD player, I thought I had it working as region-free again. You see, I opened up the player and found that the drive itself connects to the rest of the player via a standard IDE cable. So, I figured I could simply swap out another DVD-ROM drive and it’d be fixed.
Unfortunately, that was not the case. Apparently, the region encoding is done at the drive level – not in software. And in most computer drives, you can only switch regions a few times. So after swapping some discs to make sure it worked, I suddenly got this pleasant message:
Lovely.
Fuckin’ motion picture groups… as you can see from the map, DVD regions are completely artificial (and arbitrary). They were created to help control the distribution of a movie worldwide – since often times a movie will come out on DVD in the US (or North America) while it’s still in theaters somewhere else – and you don’t want people to be able to buy the DVD while you’re still trying to rape them at the theater! So you come up with this “region” thing, and even if someone from (say) Australia gets a hold of a new movie in DVD format from America, they can’t watch it – because it’s the wrong region!
I don’t think I will ever own a standard DVD player – I’ll always have a region-free one. Even if I become insanely wealthy and the prospect of re-purchasing several thousand dollars worth of DVDs doesn’t seem that bad, I’ll still buy a region-free player – just on principle.
