Is regional DVD encoding a rip-off?

[Accounting Troll]

As most of you know, DVDs are regionally encoded, so that a DVD from North American won't work in a European DVD player, although there are (expensive) multi-region DVD players available.

 

Several months ago, I brought season 1 of War of the Worlds on a North American DVD. The series was never a major success in the UK, so I didn't expect a DVD release in the UK. I figured that the DVD drive on my PC should be able to handle it, although it might require additional software. Besides, it worked out as about £10 for the entire series, so I decided to chance it.

 

Unsurprisingly, Windoze Media Player didn't want to know, and neither did RealPlayer. Windoze Media Player told me that my DVD drive was configured for European DVDs only, although I could tell Windows to reconfigure my drive. The snag is that apparently it can reconfigure my DVD drive up to five times, then the change becomes permanant. I decided that this was not a viable option.

 

Fortunatly, I found a free media player called VLC Media Player that can handle the challenge of playing a North American DVD on a European DVD drive, so I got to watch War of the Worlds, without shelling out on a multi-region DVD player.

 

This matter has got me wondering about a couple of matters to do with DVD encoding:

 

Why should Windoze Media Player insist on reconfiguring my drive when VLC media player doesn't bat an eyelid?

 

Why is Windoze (software) able to reconfigure my DVD drive (hardware) up to five times, but no more? If it can do it five times, logically it should be capable of doing it any number of times.

 

From an engineering point of view, a single universal DVD encoding is more efficient than messing around with multiple regions, so why have regional DVD encoding at all? After all, all DVDs are made in the same slave labour factory in China.

 

I suspect that the entire DVD regional encoding thing is a protectionist strategy to prevent the European and North American DVD market from being flooded with cheap imports.

[FullAuto]

Nearly all DVD players can be changed to play DVDs from any region. Just search the net for DVD hacks, and you should find one for your DVD player. There are some cheap DVD players that are multiregion out of the box, too.

 

As for playing them on your PC, if you have a DVD drive that can rip them, just rip them to your hard drive and watch them.

 

It's pretty stupid of companies to have the whole region system in place, as it just encourages them to stagger the releases, giving pirates and piracy more reason to be piratical.

[Kernel]

The region encoding is specified by the big Movie companies not by the DVD drive manufactures or Microsoft or other software player manufacters. The 5 limit change is a limit on the drive not windows. You will find that even if you re-install your PC from scratch the changes left limit will be the same as it was before.

 

More and more now though the movie companies are doing world wide releases because they realise that the region encoding isn't working the way they intended. People are simply downloading the movies they can't get hold of and the quality of the copy is usualy near DVD quality because it's been ripped from a region 1 DVD.

 

Most new normal DVD players are either multi-region or can be made multi-region through an unlocking code. This is because the manufactuers don't want to create 7 different version of the same hardware and firmware just for the region encoding. Instead they make all the players identical and let their distributers set the relevent region code before it get's sent onto the retailers.

You can also download firmware for some DVD drives to unlock them.

 

I have a work colleague who get's sent indian bollywood movies by his brother. India IIRC is in region 3 so he bought a cheap DVD player that could be unlocked by a code keyed in on the remote. You can check what players can be unlocked by doing a simple google search. You can even find the unlocking codes on some manufactuers websites.

 

I think the new HD-DVD and Blueray disks are supposed to do away with the region encoding, but I could be wrong.

[Matri]

If I recall, most DVD drives allow you to change their region 5 times, but you can also reset that number with a "Manufacturer Reset", which is 3 times, or 5. I know there is at least one piece of software out there which will allow you to reset the "resets", effectively giving you unlimited changes.

 

Heck, unless you happen to find one of those "smart region-encoded" DVDs, a Region 0 (regionless) drive can play it all.

 

Oh, it works. Trust me on this

[Bomb Bloke]

There have long been programs out there that allow you to bypass the region change limit. VLC would merely have this feature built in.

 

But these programs don't work on stand alone DVD players. The really old DVD players didn't support region encoding at all, and so would play any disc you put in them.

 

I think one possible reason for the encoding is license agreements. Companies might not be legally allowed to export their media due to to use of characters etc they don't don't own the exclusive rights to.

 

But most likely it was yet another doomed attempt to stop piracy.

[Kizmiaz]

Here is a nice page. You might need this too.

It's been a couple of years since I used them, 'cause I bought me a nice multiregion DVD-player.

[Pete]

On a side-note, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray aren't going to take off either way so hey're nothing to worry about. Holographic media on the other hand will blow everything out of the water when it arrives next year.

 

3 seasons of your favourite show complete with special features on one disc? That'll be holographic discs.

 

I laugh in the general direction of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD!

 

Back to the topic at hand, as FullAuto says it's quite cheap to get a Multi-region player. I think the cheapest I've seen on is on Amazon at about £30 and they're decent units.

 

Well worth a look.

 

The down-side with Region 1? Those funny guys over the pond seem to have less extras on their DVD's on occasion and also, on occasion depending on how audiences receive films over there, different cuts of films.

[Kernel]

I think BluRay may well take off... with plans for 800Gb disks I don't think it's going to fade away that quickly. Now HD-DVD tops out at about 60Gb per disk so that may well fade away.

 

HVDs (Holographic Versatile Disks) could theoeticly hold up to 3.9Tb (yes that's Terabytes) of data, but are currently aimed at large coorperations who have large data handling needs. I doubt we will see personal HVD players and disks for at least 2 years probably 3.

[Pete]

Well the guys behind Holographic discs are aiing to release the first "publically available" ones next year, so if you've tgot a few thousand to spare...

 

I think 2-3 years and we may well see some reasonable prices, but I think the media will stil be expensive due to the fact that you only need one disk ever probably

[Kernel]

Well the guys behind Holographic discs are aiing to release the first "publically available" ones next year, so if you've tgot a few thousand to spare...

 

You can buy HVD readers and disks now. The readers cost about $10,000 each and 200Gb disks for about $190 each.

I like the data transfer rate though.... 1 gigabyte per second. Yes I did mean byte not bits. Considering a 16x DVD rom drive tops out at 20 megabytes a second... 1 gigabyte per second is just nuts!!

[Bomb Bloke]

Are those "gigabytes" as opposed to "gibibytes"?

 

DVD encoding is usually overkill in terms of quality - I find that 100mb per 10mins usually results in very high quality playback, whereas 150mb is as good as it gets. Given that your average TV episode in 20mins, a DVD should be able to hold about 30-40 episodes of any given series.

 

Of course, if you're burning the discs yourself, you'll probably be using 4.5gb discs, which about halves that listing. Though you'll need to find an encoder that'll let you create discs at the settings that suit you.

 

The rules may well be different if you're going for HDV quality, but I've no intention of upgrading my TV. I still haven't finished watching through all the material designed for the old fashioned sets yet.

 

Even with HDV, I doubt I could find a use for an 800gb disc. My PC carries 120gb, and is usually at about 50% capacity. My X-Box has a 250gb drive, and that has that much media on it, it's just not funny. It is GREAT not having to get up to change discs - If I want to install something on my computer, I've got it in a zip file on the drive ready to go.

 

Of course, to get data onto my drives, I still need to use discs, and one DVD is better then a bunch of CDs... But I just can't imagine anyone selling me more then, say, 40gb of data in one go.