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Time Warner To Change DVD Region Coding System?
Posted by
Hemos
on Sat Oct 07, 2000 04:15 PM
from the maybe-could-be dept.
from the maybe-could-be dept.
cyber-vandal writes: "I've been playing with livid for a few months now, and someone posted a rather disturbing message on the mailing list. Apparently Time Warner are making changes to the region encoding system to stop multi-region dvd players working properly. The link can be found here. I'm hoping it's just the MPAA putting out FUD to discourage people from buying them, can anyone confirm or deny this?" I've tried reaching Time-Warner, and haven't gotten a reply - anyone else heard anything?
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Time Warner To Change DVD Region Coding System?
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Re:Not new? (Score:3)
Is this new? I seem to remember reading on /. last winter about new discs (Matrix?) which were programmed to challenge the DVD player like this:
Whereas, "compliant" players would pass:
In other words, a false challenge would be issued first. Fully region free players would fail this every time, while the "approved" players would work fine.
Re:Subversive tactics. (Score:3)
A variation on your idea:
Go to your local MegaHollyBuster and rent one of these Time Warner disks. Bring it back and bitch up a storm about it not playing; play dumb; demand a free rental. Grab another T/W disk. Come back in screaming bloody murder about their shitty disks until you get an answer that you "understand". Yell and rant some more, almost to the point of being kicked out of the store.
I guarantee it won't take very many of these episodes before they dump this dumb idea.
Re:Subversive tactics. (Score:3)
"You're welcome to try and find a legal DVD player without region coding and Macrovision protection." was his last comment before I left the store.
The problem is, you sounded too knowledgable. Act like you don't know much about DVD. "This friend of mine said that some DVD players won't take Japanese discs. This one isn't like that is it?" (Bonus points for a wide eyed I ain't never seen no city before bumpkin impresion). Make it clear that as far as you're concerned any player like that is just shoddy merchandise and they should be ashamed of themselves for selling such junk.
Re:(OT) Death threats can land you in jail (Score:3)
Re:The lack of real incentive (Score:3)
Persoanlly I would love to see a good list of movies that are effected by this that create a problem for me in the USA that I could understand without any interpreter.
Many U.S. citizens consider English a second language and *GASP* sometimes like to watch movies in their native language. Others have become fluent in another language and want to maintain their language skills. Still others Are into fan subbing and wouldn't mind reading the translation off of a sheet of paper or playing an audio recording alongside the video they legitimatly own.
I wonder how the MPAA would like it if labor and resources were 'region coded' so that discs sold in the U.K. had to be made in a U.K. factory out of raw materials from the U.K. Same for other countries. I'll bet they would be awefully upset at the mere suggestion of that! No more buy stuff (including labor) where it's cheap and sell the product where it's expensive.
Of course not. (Score:3)
2. If so, they'll have to go after a lot of DVD manufacturers, including Sony, Hitachi, Panasonic, for leaving secret codes to unlock their players.
3. I don't believe a court would allow DMCA to sanction price fixing, in this case.
(if you want me to be obedient and don't temper with region locks, first sell your friggin discs at the same price worldwide)
4. DVDCCA's strongest arguments for the DeCSS case surround piracy, not DCMA violation. Region coding has absolutely nothing to do with piracy (yes, some pirates use DeCSS, admit it), and they know that.
5. Finally, to have it protected, there has to be an international law because region coding is by definition an international thing - only enforcing it in the US is a waste of effort.
Fortunately, DMCA is not international (yet).
This is the deal (Score:3)
This is probably why the MPAA is so cranky about DECSS. Because now it is possible to change the region now on the DVDs and then cut different discs (in a hidden factory somewhere) and stamp out millions of copies.
I really do not think pirating is a problem in the US of video anymore (it is in China). Traditional channels of copyright protection exist with legal remedies to take care of unauthorized copying. The MPAA is shaking in their boots over a video "napster" however, and once you watch a movie, you tend not to watch it again unlike listening to music. What they need to do is add extra value to the DVDs - like maybe a complete soundtrack with the DVD, a copy of the screenplay, history of the writing of the screenplay etc. etc.
But these same channels do not exist in other countries, and there is little if any debate there whether it is "moral" or not. It's "just done".
The sad thing is that the MPAA has to buy off congress (done) and knife the constitution (getting ready to turn the knife) to protect their profit in other countries not even pertaining to the US.
However I say this with a caveat. If the price of DVDs climb like that what has been happening with CDs, then it suddenly becomes "economical" to pirate. This raises a whole other issue as to why CDs are so expensive and the price never drops. There obviously is no market pressure on the few big players (aka price fixing?), and as the judge in the Napster case astutely noted "why isn't there any singles like 45s in the old days?" (because it costs the same to do a single !!!)
Another thought, if the term of copyright was lowered to a term of twenty years (like patents), then there would be an inspiration to create more, better and cheaper movies. huh??
So it is really about achieving control and greed. Not that I think that people should "steal" music and video, but that it is more of a symptom. If traditional market pressures existed in the recorded movie/music business (as it obviously doesn't now - antitrust issues are rife here) I doubt if we would even be having these problems now.
How the hell would this work? (Score:3)
This new standard is supposed to still work on current one region players right. Isn't all a multi-region player is is a player which can emulate any regions players?
The only way I can imagine them doing something like this is to put this extra warning in a section encoded for the wrong region. That way the multi-region players will play this sopt which will issue the warning and somehow stop the playing of the rest of the DVD.
This of course will last about 10 minutes before the multi-region players merely become region selectable players.
This is nothing new! (Score:3)
Basically, a DVD player has not one, but two places that contain the region code. One is a bitmap with one bit per region, stored in the MPEG stream. Normally, a player will only play a disc with a specific bit set in the region code bitmap, and a disc will have one or more regions set.
Note that there are eight bits, but only six regions. The other two are reserved for future use. In fact, I think one of them is intended for use in special situations, like in-flight movies on airplanes. I have found disks advertised as "all region", which would not play in regions 7 or 8, and others which would play in all regions 1 thru 8.
The second place is in a register that is readable by the GUI code. (As mentioned in an earlier response, this is register #20.) Because this is an integer, it can contain only one region code at any given time. So the player will have one "native" zone, regardless of how permissive its bitmap is.
There are two types of region mods. One, typically called "region zero", is to simply disable the MPEG region checking. This is like using a crowbar to open a locked door. The second is to make the player truly switch regions so that it becomes a player from another region. This is like having a keyring with all the keys on it. (I suppose there's also a third way, which is to region-zero the bitmap, and make the GUI region switchable for trick disks. Or even better yet, have it check the bitmap and set register #20 automatically. I guess this would be like having a master key. But I haven't heard about people doing this.)
The "region-zero" mod won't change your GUI region, so any "trick" disk from the same region as the "native" region of the player, will always play, as always. However, the mod itself may change the native region of the player from its factory setting, say to zone 1, which is the most useful.
Switching the regions works well, and some players let you do that from secret codes on the remote. But such players may also have a built-in counter so that you can only change regions 5-25 times before it stays locked.
The best are players which have been modded to be infinitely region switchable, and Macrovision disabled. The Pioneer 505, 909, and 606 (from before Pioneer changed their logo) were famous for only requiring two jumper wires be soldered to the MPEG board. Then the CONDITION button in the right menu would switch regions.
There's one more cool thing that can be done with this. There are now discs which check the GUI region and enable/disable features depending on the native region of the player. So you might get Chinese subtitles on a region 3 player, but not a region 1 player. This lets them sell in multiple regions, but they only have to master the disc once, and only keep one item in stock. Ghostbusters II is supposed to be one of these.
There is a similar situation with the Playstation. Most Playstation chips work by blasting the special subcodes over and over into the right input. However, many of the people who installed chips also happened to sell games, and were just as annoyed at piracy as Sony was. So someone came up with the "anti-piracy" chip. This chip watched for the first three bytes of the subcode (SCEA, SCEJ, SCEE), and blasted the last byte of the USA code whenever it saw them. A CD-R wouldn't have the subcodes, and the chip would know it.
Then someone came up with a trick to check for chips by only putting the subcodes where it was necessary to boot the game. It would check parts of the disc that did NOT have the subcodes, and get pissed if it found them. The best part was that anti-piracy chips had no trouble with this scheme, because they didn't send the subcodes when they weren't supposed to. (Sure, someone then came up with the "stealth" chip, which disables itself after running long enough to boot a disc, but that's not as l33t as the way anti-piracy chips work.)
Good Thing (Score:3)
Joe Public probably buys his DVDs at the same store he bought his player, and has no idea about region coding, content scrambling, DeCSS, or the way the MPAA has starting making up copyright protections.
Big bold letters to the effect of "You can't play this $30 disc in your $200 player, and sorry we didn't tell you sooner" may be just what it takes to make this issue a public concern, rather than just a small underground vs. big business thing.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Re:you you you, you BAD PERSON (Score:3)
you didn't tell us which model
7thzone.com [7thzone.com] has an extensive selection of 'region-free solutions'.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
Clever idea--easy to bypass (Score:5)
Now this is easy to bypass. The trick is that you have to have the player figure out what region the disc wants and switch to that region, and that region only. For now, this will require a player that allows you to manually reset the region. For example, with my Raite 715 DVD/MP3 player, I can use a secret menu to set it to region free, or to any specific region. Hence, I can set it to only region 1 for these new DVDs and to region free when I want to play some other region.
Eventually, we can hope someone will put out a player that detects that the majority of the content is flagged for a given region, so it will switch to that region. What would be really cool is a DVD player with open-source firmware. Hey, that's what Livid is!
Fatal Flaw (Score:5)
The flaw here is that the disc is not capable of actually detecting anything. To detect something, some software is going to have to run on the player. That means that the player is in charge, and can do whatever it wants with the software. Namely, the player could be programmed to simply return whatever return code is neccessary for the DVD's software to continue executing, instead of showing the warning on the screen.
This is a really silly move on the part of Warner. It is going to cost them money to do this. It will certainly also cost them goodwill. It will not be effective. Existing DVD players could be modified to work around this. New DVD players can be designed to work around this. Software which runs on general-purpose computers (e.g. livid) can easily be modified to circumvent this.
I imagine that Warner's software is going to try to detect a multi-region player by presenting itself as two different regions and seeing if the player will play both. The solution is simple and obvious: once the player chooses a region for the DVD, lock that region in and always claim to be a player from that region until another disc is inserted. There isn't any writeable memory on a DVD, so it isn't as if the disc itself can store the region code of the player.
Re:regions (Score:3)
this is no big deal (Score:4)
Bottom line: most region-hacked players are region changeable, so this is not a problem.
Some technical details (Score:3)
I don't believe that this is anything particularily new. I think other DVD creators have already been doing this.
Region code checking is up to the DVD player. Does the region code of the player match the region code of the disk?
Yes, play the disk
No, don't play the disk
However the DVD standard allows for assembly language like code to be put on the disk. Normally this is used to do the menus and other things. However you can use to further check that the region code reported from the DVD makes sense.
For example:
Mov GPRM0, SPRM20 ; get the region code of the player
NE GPRM0, 1 ; If region code is not exactly ONE
GOTO Failure ; then either this is the wrong player or the user hacked it.
For further info see the July 98 edition of DDJ.
Re:regions (Score:3)
They're separating the market out into segments so that they can target the different points in the supply/demand curves that exist in those different markets. Taking this to an extreme would be what Amazon is doing - which is to separate the market into segments of size 1 person and target the price to hit that demand curve right.
Re:Fatal Flaw (Score:3)
> With the online retailers, we must discuss the
> need to properly notify consumers outside
> the region 1 territories that the disc may not
> play in their player before the disc is
> purchased. The customer dissatisfaction and
> returns risk is significant if this is not done.
Some "innocent bystanders" are likely to get burned.
Subversive tactics. (Score:5)
So what have you done? Yes, you there behind the browser window. Have you done anything to lessen the power of the big companies? Have you done anything to, in whatever small way, discourage the usage of region-coding?
Here's a small tip. It is really a silly one, but yet. It is the only kind of pressure you can easily apply. I did this a few months ago, and it was really satisfying. If many people do it, things would change.
I went with my parents to buy them a DVD player. We went into a big TV/Video/DVD/Washing machines/Refrigerator/etc store, and started talking to one of their sales persons. We explained that we were interested in a DVD player. He showed us to the TV/Video department, and started showing us different players. He went on and on about the relative advantages of the different models, and just when we had homed in on this one model, just when he expected us to say "we'll take that one", I dropped the big question: "Of course it's region-free?" He got an anxious look to his face, and said "Well, no..." We looked very disappointed, and he did too. "Are any of these models region-free?" He looked even more sad than before "Well..., no... But really, you don't..." We just said "thanks" and went out of the store.
Next store, same story. And the next. When we had visited the five largest resellers of TV-related equipment in town, I felt like a king. At all five stores, the sales person looked like he had just lost his job when we left. After all, $200-$400 is rather a lot of money, even for a big store. And it showed clearly that they hadn't even thought about the possibility that region-freeness was a sales argument. They didn't know people wanted that. Now they did.
Luckily for my parents, at the sixth store they had a region-free DVD-player, and we bought that.
Now, if the sales persons at all these stores gets one potential buyer a month that leaves because the store does not carry region-free DVD-players, they don't care. If every sales person gets ten such customers a day, they'll do something about it. And Time-Warner and the others will hear about it too, after a while. Retailers will start to complain that they're losing customers due to the region-coding. Sony and the other big manufacturers will get pressure on them to have region-free models, which they can only do if Time-Warner and the others accept it. So they'll pressure Time-Warner to back off.
So what have you done to discourage region-coded DVD-players? The next time you pass a TV-store, pretend you want to buy a DVD-player. Let the sales person go on for a bit, and just when you have "decided" on a model, drop the killer line "It's region-free, of course?" When they have no region-free models, look very, very disappointed, and say something like "Oh, then I'm not interested. And that player looked so nice, so bad it's region coded." and leave. If they, by chance, do have a region-free model, just say that you're interested but that you'll have to think about it, and that you'll come back another day.
Remember, ten people every day could make a difference. Let's show them what we think.