Page 1 of A ? 4 all U wonderful people that find the region hacks for us mere mortals?!

Just a question for all you good people that find/discover/whatever region hacks for those of us less gifted.
How the hell do you do it? 
Do you just punch a few buttons at random and hope for a result?
Is there something more techno or even, dare I say, geeky/nerdy about it?
In short, how the hell do you do it?
For instance my Silvercrest DVD has the hack 136900?
Who on earth came up with that?
Never in a million years would I have come up with that, are they somebodies lottery numbers or something?
For instance there is one hack where you go into the players set up menu, press chapter forward and back a couple of times, dance naked around your back garden and hey presto!
A region free DVD Player/Recorder!
I made up the bit about the dancing naked!
How do you do it?
Personally I haven`t a clue how, but am eternally grateful to those who do, the only player I`ve had that I haven`t managed a hack on packed up before I had chance to hack it, a Maplins Nikkai thingy!
Yours forever gratefully, 

Roy B.

In the early days, when only a handful of DVD players were on the market, I used to help people find hacks by identifying their firmware as a clone of another machine, so if you knew that machine`s hack, you could see if it was the same, and it generally was.

I guess it`s pretty much the same these days but far more complicated because of the thousands of models of DVD players available on the market. As for new and exclusive hacks, I suspect that`s inside information from repair engineers who need to know these things.

If someone comes onto our forum asking if anyone knows the hack for their machine, sometimes I can help, but only by googling the known hack websites until someone comes up with a match against that model number. I could just direct them to the same sites, but I know I can look much faster than most people because I know what I`m doing and where to look.

One of the DVD players I used to sell were the high end Arcam units. To meet the rules of the DVD Forum they could only make a player that worked with the region they were to be sold. However, if you had bought a £1200 player and were to move to a different region, you would still want it to work. So "authorised Arcam agents" were given a code to change the region. This was of course passed around willly nilly. I guess that is the same sort of thing for the rest of them out there.



"Talking`s for lesbians" Psycho Paul 2011.

Tahks Smurfette for that enlightening info...........I still wouldn`t know how to do it so thank god there usually is someone who can.
Yours in slightly less blissful ignorance,

Roy B.

At least one of the region hacks in our archives I was given by the PR person from the company that was selling it.


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I guess it`s like divx/xvid/mkv playback.

At first multiregion was a "naughty" frowned upon thing to do, but when manufactureres realised they were losing sales to companies which didn`t make it too difficult/sold machines as multi region they started making it easier/not such a secret, knowing leaked engineer codes would help sales.

I remember Sony players used to have a new chip put in to make them multi region. When they realised people were doing this and they could not stop people like me selling them chipped, they made their top end UK crt tv`s so they wouldn`t accept an NTSC signal. That way the set would not recognize the signal from the chipped player. Needless to say, we took those sets off the shop floor and refused to sell them.



"Talking`s for lesbians" Psycho Paul 2011.

Dear `The original 42er MD` (hellava moniker there?)
I`d guess Sony would be in amongst it, greedy, money grabbing................................................
This region thing, I take it that it`s purely a maximising money grabbing by the machine manufacturers and the film production companies?

Roy B.

Quote:
Crazytrucker says...
This region thing, I take it that it`s purely a maximising money grabbing by the machine manufacturers and the film production companies?It was originally meant to be a way to prevent one Territory gaining the advantage of viewing content that was either still in the cinema or yet to arrive.
So basically, if you had a movie out in the States (r1) and you were in the UK (r2) but said movie had now made it to DVD in R1 but not yet or still in the UK cinema, you could just import the disc instead (as I`m sure many of us did!)

So basically, yes. It was a way to maximise profit from each release and try to milk it for everything it was worth.
To the hack discovering thing, various methods were used.

Some guys sat with programming equipment and read the firmware to look for a code, and if one didn`t exist, try to inject a code into a firmware.
Then there were the guys like me who literally stripped the hardware to pieces to identify the original manufacturer to try and find hacks or codes that way, then once there it was trial and error, with some button mashing thrown in for good measure. 
I found the Aiwa 370 hack in about 2 and a half hourse after purchase, but the VCD on/off hack for the LG series took a couple of months. I never released that one due to the possibility of damaging the player (not permanently but you try and re-enable video when you have a blank screen due to switching it off!) and it has now become better known as the 1471 or hex code hack which you can see to this day still screws up players.
Like I said, I kept it quiet but another member released it and the rest is history.

Some hack codes are simply gleaned from Manufacturers as hey aren`t really "hacks", they are engineer codes to allow Engineers to work on any machine worldwide. If you bought a player here in the UK then moved to China and took your setup with you, you`d be mighty ****ed if the Engineer couldn`t fix your player due to the region lock and had to send it back to the country of origin.
This also meant most companies could make one player with very minor or subtle changes (LG 3350`s were sold in Saudi Arabia with VCD enabled but in the UK and US it was disabled) and sell it worldwide with only the box graphics, the labels and the code being changed depending on country of sale.

That reminds me... MR S...did I ever send you the code for the iSymphony iPod hifi/DVD player....?

Jimbo : oÞ

"There`s that word again... is there a problem with the Earth`s gravitational pull in the future?"

It is to help maximizes returns on a film. It used to be a film came out months before here in the US. By the time we got the film on the big screen, the DVD was out over there. If there was no region then we could get the dvd and not have to go to the cinema over here. Or then buy the UK DVD.

They sometimes change films to suite either the audience or censor in a territory. The region system helps them with that.

It is all to help the film companies and not the hardware manufactures. But Sony have their fingers in both pie.



"Talking`s for lesbians" Psycho Paul 2011.