Looking for a good DVD player

[vsp]

My wife is a movie nut, and with her birthday approaching rapidly, I'm considering getting her a DVD player. I have some fundamental problems with the handling of the DVD format (can you say "DeCSS?" Can you say "region coding?" Can you say "Jack Valenti's head on a spike?"), but I know she'll enjoy the extras they're putting on DVDs.

The problem is that I want to get one from a halfway-reliable manufacturer, but I also suspect that the big boys aren't putting in the hidden menus that'll let me disable Macrovision, change my region code, and otherwise personally use the discs I pay for in the way I see fit. As far as I'm concerned, since I don't plan on distributing bootlegs to others, it's none of the MPAA's business what part of the world my discs come from or whether I dump selected scenes to VHS.

Are there any players out there that are recommended, having a reasonable blend of picture quality, durability, brand-name recognition and fair-use support?

[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by vsp
My wife is a movie nut, and with her birthday approaching rapidly, I'm considering getting her a DVD player.

That has got to be the biggest load I've heard...you mean YOU want the DVD player.

[vsp]

Actually... I'm not a fan of the DVD format, or I'd probably have bought a player already.

I have no problem with the audio & video quality of VHS tapes (and don't see the need to pay an extra $5-10 for a DVD just for a sharper picture -- it'll be playing on the same TV and through the same speakers, after all). It's only in the last couple of years that I've seen a major advantage of CDs over cassettes (ease of ripping to .MP3s) -- they play the same songs, after all. DVDs don't have that advantage, or at least not easily, and my new Athlon doesn't have a DVD-ROM in it yet.

I loathe the "Here's a movie you already own, but it's in a new format, so buy it again" mentality that the MPAA and retailers perpetuate -- I can't think of a single album, for example, that I own on both cassette and CD formats. Why should I? I've already paid an inflated store price for it once.

A friend of mine went out and got one, and was spastic with glee over the concept. He sat down and plopped in A Clockwork Orange, we watched it, and he said "Whaddya think?" I reached over to his tape rack, picked up A Clockwork Orange on VHS, and told him that he'd just spent $250 (player + disc + cables) to watch something he'd already paid for on a player he'd already paid for. He looked at me like I was a Luddite.

I hate how recent movies have been marketed. For example, I've gone into the store to buy both South Park: BLU and Crouching Tiger on their release dates, only to find that only DVDs were available and that VHS tapes would come out "later." When? "Later. A few months from now. We don't know when. In the meantime, pay an extra ten bucks and two hundred for a player so you can hear the director talk about what he had for lunch during the filming of Scene 23."

Then you have all the rereleases onto DVD of movies that probably never should've been in the theaters in the first place. The Internet fanboys scream with joy when Movie X comes out on DVD, when it's been on the used rack at their local Blockbastard for $4.99 and has a three-inch layer of dust on it in VHS. But now we get to pay $24.99 for the DELUXE dust-collecting version! Woohoo!

VHS tapes are NOT REGION-CODED (apart from that little PAL/NTSC issue with European tapes). DVDs are. That alone is a major issue.

DVDs let you jump directly to the scene of your choice. Provided, of course, that you want to jump directly to the beginning of that scene and not somewhere in the middle of it, in which case you'll be using the same Rewind and Fast Forward buttons found on my VCR. Which, unlike a DVD player, I can _record_ on.

And then there's the little matter of DeCSS vs. the MPAA, which I'm sure I don't need to elaborate on.

I can see where DVDs have some minor advantages -- for instance, I love the idea of being able to pop in a foreign film and choose between dubbing and subtitles. If, that is, the film gets released in the US so that my region-crippled domestic DVD player can play it. Some DVD manufacturers do throw in all sorts of bells and whistles and enhancements with their movies -- which they could just as easily release on VHS in most cases, and which I might pay more for to justify their release, but they don't usually choose to do that. I can own a movie earlier on DVD than on VHS (and pay a lot more for the right to do so).

Can you tell that I'm just lusting for a DVD player of my very own?

Like I said -- my wife is a movie nut, and will likely enjoy those advantages and not care about most of the disadvantages. I'm tempted to get a second, brand-X region-free player for the bedroom TV for foreign discs... except that that TV doesn't have composite input, so I'd need to crank up the ol' RF modulator or get a new TV for that room anyway.

Sigh. Technology advances, and big business finds new ways to screw it up.

[elSicomoro]

I could tell you're not a fan vsp...the way you started your post reminded me of the things that some men will do to justify buying something not necessarily needed.

Seriously though, could you (or someone else) better explain this DeCSS situation and region coding to me? I'd be lying if I said I never heard of this before.

[vsp]

Okay, I'll do this as simply as I can.

The region-coding issue is simple at heart: the media producers of the world have divided the world up into several sections for marketing purposes. (For example, game consoles like PlayStations and Dreamcasts have US, European and Japanese versions, among others.)

Roughly speaking, for DVDs, it's like this:

1 = US and nearby possessions
2 = Western Europe, Japan, South Africa, the Middle East
3 = Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia
4 = Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, South America
5 = Russia, Eastern Europe, most of Africa, North Korea
6 = China
There is also a Zone 0, for region-free discs, but very few of those exist.

99% of the DVD players in the world have a single region built into their firmware -- for instance, every player you can buy off the rack at a major US store is Region 1. This is done to control what movies are available in certain parts of the world at any given time, strictly for economic/marketing reasons.

If you have a Region 2 disc and attempt to play it on a Region 1 player, the disc will not play. Certain manufacturers created Region 0 players (capable of playing 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6); the DVD manufacturers then adjusted their encoding so that many of their discs will not play on Region 0 players. Interested in something that's not available (or not available yet) in your region of the world? Tough -- you're not allowed to watch it, according to the powers that be.

This is what is known in technical terms as a "crock of shit."

Now, several DVD players have hidden menus that allow you to monkey with the region setting, enabling you to watch movies from anywhere in the world by temporarily setting the player to their encoded region. (Some, like Philips players, only allow this to be changed a finite number of times, after which it's locked; others, primarily brand-X manufacturers, let you modify it as needed.) Unfortunately, most of the major DVD player manufacturers are in the back pocket of the Motion Picture Association of America, and thus leave out this useful feature.

There are also hardware hacks, much like there are for game consoles (the PlayStation has a handful of methods for bypassing country checks, for instance).

NOW...

DeCSS is a software program written by a German hacking group, designed to get around DVD encryption. Y'see, in 1999, the only commercial software players available for home computers were for Windows and (later) Macintosh. Thus, a consumer could have a perfectly legal and original DVD, a store-bought DVD-ROM in his PC, and be unable to view it in any way because he was running Linux, FreeBSD or some other alternative to Windows.

In order to write the proper DVD-ROM device drivers and software for Linux, it was necessary to break the CSS encryption system. This proved to be a trivial task, particularly when one of the encryption keys was inadvertently leaked to the public in an unencrypted form (I'd have to go back and look up whose fault that was). The group whipped up DeCSS, which disabled the encryption and allowed Linux DVD software to take it from there, and a 16-year-old in Norway named Jon Johansen (a member of the group) posted a link to the source on his website. Now DVDs could be enjoyed by (and purchased by) consumers regardless of which OS they ran, and all was well. Right?

Wrong, actually. At the behest of the Motion Picture Association of America, Nordic cops swarmed Johansen's home and took his equipment, and other links to the software worldwide were swatted down by cease-and-desist orders and threats of lawsuits. According to the MPAA, DeCSS violated a rather nasty US law known as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which labels attempts to break encryption on consumer products for ANY purpose (legal or not, fair use or not) as criminal activity. Trade agreements extended this US law to just about every nation the US does business with, including Norway, in case you're wondering how Hollywood producers had enough influence to make Norway's police mobilize and bust a teenager.

Clearly, stated Jack Valenti and his MPAA drones, DeCSS was designed for rampant movie piracy. As it happens, DVD piracy was occurring worldwide long before DeCSS appeared (software existed to make bit-per-bit copies, actually copying the encryption as well as the content, and other programs grabbed the movie during playback (after it had been decrypted by the player) and dumped it to a hard drive for conversion to VCD). As it happens, this was the only method available for viewing legally-purchased DVDs on legally-purchased DVD-ROMs in non-Windows environments. This didn't slow down the MPAA's legal bulldozers, unfortunately; among others, 2600 Magazine (a US magazine devoted to hacking, cracking and assorted digital sleight-of-hand) was slapped down in court for maintaining links to the source code on their web page.

You read that correctly -- not only was it "illegal" to distribute this software, but courts ruled that it was illegal to merely LINK to where the software could be found. This has some serious privacy and legal implications -- imagine if your web page points to a dot.com somewhere, it folds, the new owner of the domain name quietly fills the site with child pornography and you fail to update your links (having not heard about the abrupt change in format). Can you be arrested for distributing illegal materials? According to these judges, YES, you can be. An assistant US attorney likened DeCSS to "software programs that shut down navigational programs in airplanes or smoke detectors in hotels," claiming that it "creates a very real possibility of harm."

This would generate a lot more snickering among the hackers of the world, if it wasn't for the fact that many US judges are far from technologically savvy and BUY these arguments, and rule accordingly.

Naturally, DeCSS, Johansen and the DMCA have become major buzzwords among the legal and online communities, and the legal wrangling continues to this day.

This is all off the top of my head, of course. Try:
http://www.eff.org/Intellectual_prop...PAA_DVD_cases/
or
http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/p...cgi?name=decss
for more detailed information on these cases.

[roXet]

VSP,

I know what you mean about all the region codes and CSS crap that is going on with DVD right now. I put off getting a DVD player until my brother-in-law bought my wife and I one for a wedding present. We are both movie freaks so we have really enjoyed the extra features you get on the DVD's.

Anways, I've got an Aiwa player, it plays mp3's, vcd's and it has a "remote hack" to make the player region-free. I've been very happy with this player, the only problem is that I don't have enough money to buy all the disc's that I want. Oh yeah, I can't remember what model it is right now, but I'll look it up when I get home and let you know so you can do some research on it or something.

roXet