A very tiny bit of electronic civil disobedience
 

As you may know if you buy DVDs, most DVDs come with a "Region Code" that prevents the DVD from being played outside the region is was sold in. I have just struck a tiny blow for consumer choice by purchasing a CyberHome DVD player. It is an open secret that these players can easily have their region coding bypassed, and so play DVDs from anywhere in the world. I feel like such a criminal!! :blunt:

Tell me more about this Steve-o...that is, if you don't mind feeling more criminal. You may recall my loathing of the region codes in another thread.

Oh jeez..... I think the police are here....

Not much to tell... if you poke around on the net you can find lists of DVD players and how to hack them. Based on my very very limited research, there seem to be two avenues: buy a "name brand" unit (JVC, Toshiba, etc.) and get a special chip for it; or buy a "no-name" unit which is amenable to you using a "cheat code" similar to what you find with some video games. I chose the CyberHome DVD-402 player, which in addition to being region free, has some neat features my old player lacked (it will play MP3s, it will recognize CD-Rs, it will display photos if you give it a disc of JPGs, and it will play VCDs). Best Buy currently has it for $57.99 minus a $10 rebate. (Or have it for online ordering at least.. I have read that there's not much stock at the B&M stores; my local one was out.)

Check out http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~yuan/dvd.html ; also the International DVD forum at http://www.dvdtalk.com and the forums at http://www.nerd-out.com.

My first two DVDs scored for it are Flash Gordon (which is out of print in the US but still released in the UK; copies of the out-of-print US release have been selling on Ebay for about the same as I paid for my DVD player) and Kiki's Delivery Service. (Yes I realize it's out on the US in April. Call me perverse; I'm a Miyazaki fan and I thought it would be cool to have the Japanese edition.)

Oh are you ever in trouble with The Man. You know of course that Sycamore aspires to being The Man.

Damn Griff...that hurts...a lot.

I don't aspire to be the man...I just want to be as close to equal footing as possible. :)

As my eight year old says with mock sincerity...soooooorrrrrrrrry. ;) We know that when you reach Manhood, oppression won't be your bag baby.

That's interesting, Steve, and I've read about some of this stuff. However, I do see a problem with this: Aren't there some discs that (based on their encoding) will not play if they cannot determine the "proper" region code for your player?

Some newer discs are doing this, yes.

And some <a href="http://www.hkflix.com/hardware/malata_dvp-520.asp">newer players</a> have ways around that, too.

Better locks, better lockpicks. Happens every time.

Beautiful! And not a bad price--$275. I would imagine that price to be in half a year from now.

"It's impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are ingenious."--unknown

As far as I can tell, the player i got does not have a problem with these discs. I read a couple posts from people who said that the "Region Coding Enhancement" discs played OK on it. And I have been able to play my copy of Spiderman (one of the RCE discs) on it just fine, while the player rigged for Region 0. (you can actually tell it what region you want it to be, so should be easy enough to take it back to region 1 if needed.)

Isn't region 0 Cruise ship/Airplane?

AFAIK, airplane/cruise ships/other international venues are Region 8.

I don't think Region 0 exists in the official MPAA scheme of the world (tho I could be wrong). It's the casual term for a DVD player that will play discs from any region, or a disc that will play in a player from any region.