My, my, my ... I go out of town for a few days and things get all out of hand ...
First an innocent question about region coding and a few misunderstandings of what's going on turns into a fight about copying. Let me throw my two cents worth of gasoline onto the fire. Region coding has little to do with copying and almost all to do with marketing. It was traditional until very recently that Hollywood movies were released first in North America, six months later in Europe, and another few months later in Asia. The DVDs are released about six months after the movies in all parts of the world. The region codes are there to make it more difficult for Japanese consumers to buy DVDs of movies before the movies are released on-screen in Japan. Since movies are now released all over the world at pretty much the same time, the region-coding scheme is becoming irrelevant. North American commercial DVDs are region 1 DVDs. Japan, Europe and a few other places are region 2. A region 0 DVD is region-free and can be played anywhere. Blank DVD-R media has no inherent region. It can be set to any region when recorded. iDVD defaults to region 0. More advanced authoring software, such as DVD Studio Pro, lets you set the region when the disk image is created. If you want a region-free software DVD player on your Mac, try VLC <http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html> Many (most?) hardware DVD players can easily be hacked into being region-free by pushing the "secret" sequence of buttons on their remote controllers. You Google the model number of your machine to find out how. Both of my Apex players and my Toshiba TV with built-in DVD player were easy to find. These hacks are there because the Chinese make these sets for the whole world and don't want to be bothered too much with worrying about where a certain model will be sold. Region coding has nothing to do with copy protection. There is no copy protection on a commercial DVD other than the fact that commercial DVDs are double-layered and DVD-R disks are single-layered. This means that there's generally too much data on the commercial DVD to fit it onto a DVD-R. So, the movie must be copied and re-encoded to have a smaller footprint. This means the MPEG2 file on the original is re-encoded with with less resolution and missing sound tracks for the languages and sound formats you don't use. There's plenty of software out there to do this--both commercial and free. The commercial software is faster and easier to use, but the free stuff works just as well. I don't want to get into the details here because KR will probably e-mail me an explosive virus, if I do. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be July 27. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
