Page 1 of in the future - no more multiregion ?

hi,
I tend to get quite a few region 1 dvds, which play fine on my 6 year old pioneer 515 multiregion player. However, my rather brainy girlfriend, (who tolerates my dvd obession), pointed out that i shouldn`t get any more region 1 dvds, because when my next player might be protected against multiregion hack. What do you think ? In the next few years (and beyond) will we still be able to buy players which are already multiregion ? Will the remote control hack still work ? Or will the disks themselves be protected against this ? (i.e. more protected than region-free protection)
thanks

In the foreseeable future - very unlikely.

DVD players are multiregion almost soley due to economics - They build the same player for pretty much the global market, and then simply tweak it for the different areas. To hardwire the machines to a region code would result in significant cost.

As a side issue, I doubt many manufacturers are disappointed when their machines are hacked, because it makes them more attractive to a wider market of customers - If you were selling players, would you want yours to be the only one which couldn`t be made region free ?!

Quote:
...pointed out that i shouldn`t get any more region 1 dvds...

Perhaps she`s only tolerating your obsession on the surface, but suggesting such things as above is something sneaky and underhand, just what I might expect from the female of the species. ;-) Just an observation!

Anil
___________________________________________________
Anil Khedun
News Team and Reviewer, DVD Reviewer
The UK`s BIGGEST Online DVD Magazine!

very insightful Anil !
Thanks for the advice Dan. Do you think the goverments of each region will crack down, and pass law saying that all companies will have to make sure their players can only play that region`s dvds ?
Or are they more concerned with pirated dvds / cinema releases ?

Quote:
Or will the disks themselves be protected against this ? (i.e. more protected than region-free protection)

No. It`s not possible to author a DVD so that it plays (for example) on all Region 1 players, yet refuses to play on all multiregion players. If a multiregion DVD player is set to Region 1, then as far as any disc is concerned it is a Region 1 player.

RCE (which confuses some multi-region mods that attempt to determine the region automatically) is basically as far as it`s possible to go with the current DVD format.

Quote:
Do you think the goverments of each region will crack down, and pass law saying that all companies will have to make sure their players can only play that region`s dvds ?

Nah. DVD has been around for over 7 years - if they were going to do that, they`d have done it ages ago. People now take it for granted that they can play discs from any region, so it`s far too late to put that particular genie back in the bottle.

I`d say piracy is the main concern these days, especially with the increasing popularity of DVD writers.

Mike

This item was edited on Friday, 10th September 2004, 12:20

thanks for the advice. Your arguments make sense. Time to order that region 1 boxset of alias season 3 then!!

I have been hearing noises that the manufactors are looking at scrapping regions full stop :D .
Totally region free players ?.
We can only hope ;)





(A.C.C Founder)

Region coding was a totally barking idea the manufacturers put into the DVD standard to get the movie studios on board and support the format with software. All it does is support and echo the international marketing model the studios have been using for decades rolling movies out across the world. R1 (the home market) is the most important, followed by Japan and Europe (R2) - now where`s the logic in lumping Europe in with Japan? The further down the numbers you get, the older and tattier the prints being distributed to cinemas (as the value of each market decreases). What they didn`t realise was the desire not to have to go to a fleapit cinema and watch a decrepit print with six months worth of projectionists` fingerprints on it is inversely proportional to the value of the market. In other words, the countries who import and or pirate would rather watch a pristine copy on telly at home than a sh*tty print at the local Jakarta Odeon.

If only people like Jack Valenti and Michael Eisner would wake up to the idea of a global market. Maybe if you said it slowly, break it down into syllables - Ger-low-bal Maa-rket. No? Still too high concept?

J Mark Oates