Andrew Bowden wrote:
If everyone - and I mean everyone - made their DVD player multi-region,
it would be far harder to justify making region-encoded DVDs.
DVD region coding rides on the coat-tails of different international
video standards, so I think pressure against DVD region coding could
never become very severe.
It's not enough that your DVD player be multi-region in order to
watch out-of-region discs, your TV also has to know what to do
with the signal. At least in North America, it's quite hard to find
multi-standard TVs, so a multi-region DVD player could play a UK DVD,
for example, but the TV wouldn't display it because PAL wouldn't
make sense to it.
For what are probably comedy reasons, DVD region 2 includes the
UK (PAL), France (SECAM) and Japan (NTSC). This, combined with
the economics of manufacturing, has probably dictated that UK DVD
players be more capable (and therefore more hackable) than for other
regions, since DVD players bound for region 2 already have to be
able to cope with every video standard in the world, plus dog.
(I'd be interested in real data that supports or contradicts
this supposition, by the way.)
This is different from the situation with MP3 players, for example,
where there is a world-wide standard on how to go from bits to
audio that isn't hamstrung by history. Consequently, I think lessons
from DVD region coding have limited applicability to how DRM might
work out in other areas.
--
Frank Wales [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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