How to enjoy media in any region

I wish I was in control of my DVDs!

I am really getting fed up with the annoying things that modern DVDs do - so much so that I am buying and renting less these days and just wait until a film is shown on TV (then record it myself!)

I am even starting to wonder if it is worth buying some of the better quality pirate copies instead of the official ones.

What is it that I find so grating?

Firstly many of my newer DVDs demand that I enter my country or language first (which is odd because I had to program the DVD player to also know what language I prefer). And being in the UK it is always the last item that needs selecting on page 2 or 3 (or sometimes even 4 or 5!).

Next I have to sit through a 2 or 3 minute lecture on those nasty pirates and how I mustn't buy DVDs from them. Generally you can't skip these and they seem to be trying to stop you fast-forwarding them too.

Then you get anything up to 10 trailers for other DVDs, even if you already own them, and I swear each DVD I buy has more trailers than the last! Even if you are allowed to skip or fast-forward these that sometimes only gets you to the start of the next trailer.

When you get to the actual menu you then have to sit and watch all the best bits of the film (in many cases totally ruining the plot as key bits are often given away) before it becomes clear which bit you need to select to start the film.

Come back VHS, all is forgiven!

DVD in SECAM?

I have never seen a French DVD coded in SECAM. They have all been PAL. Players sold in France, both DVD and VHS, have always been dual PAL/SECAM or triple PAL/SECAM/NTSC.

And now with the digital broadcasting in France, SECAM has almost disappeared totally.

Shipping cost may be prohibiting using amazon.com for buying region 1 DVDs, but try dvdboxoffice.com. It's Canadian, so their DVDs even have French subtitles most of the times, and worldwide shipping is included in their prices.

More Tools

A decent article covering most of the options -- thanks.

You can also use your computer to play DVDs from any region. The dangerous way is to let your player change the region code of your DVD drive. However, you can only do this 5 times before the drive becomes permanently locked to the last region.

Although there are various firmware hacks, they are drive-specific and can be tricky to apply. A much better option I've been using for years is DVD IdlePro from Fangtao Software. This tiny bit of code sits between your player software and your DVD drive. It automatically 'neutralises' the region code and bypasses RCE, RPC2 and Macrovision. It works great and updates are free for life.

You can also extract DVDs to your hard drive using DVD Shrink or a similar program. These remove region protection code and give you various options for compression, removing unwanted audio tracks and so forth. Once extracted you can re-burn to a DVD but with the region locking removed. But, be careful about which compression option you choose, otherwise the movie may not fit on a single DVD anymore.

After employing either of the above techniques, you can obviously send the video signal from your computer to your TV or projector.

All I will say is VLC, VLC and VLC.

Use VLC and you can watch any region on your PC without hacking the firmware on your DVD drive.

I use it for my telly downstairs and it is free as well.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Defeating DVD region encoding

The easiest way to defeat region encoding is to go to WalMart and buy the CHEAPEST DVD player on the shelf - usually some generic $25 Chinese wonder called "Super Spectra Vision" or the like.

These cheapo units will often play anything that you throw at them, where the brand name units will be a lot more fussy.

"Electrical current" is identical all over the world

I would hope for better from a 'tech-savvy' journo.

Eletrical current, measured in amps or amperes (not volts), is a measure of how electrons are affected by an applied voltage and is globally identical. Utility voltage is what varies around the planet.

Ohm's law states that, in an electrical circuit, the current passing through a conductor, from one terminal point on the conductor to another terminal point on the conductor, is directly proportional to the potential difference across the two terminal points and inversely proportional to the resistance of the conductor between the two terminal points (commonly summerised as V=IR, although V=IZ is actually more accurate).

What is most important to note is that, when considering an appliance, current is an observed effect of the voltage being applied to the load (Z) on electrons or other charge carriers within said load, a pretty good anology would be water moving in a river.

Defeating RCE...

While the region 0 loophole has been closed, they left another one open - region 9. IIRC, region 0 corresponds to 'ignore region coding' whereas region 9 corresponds to 'accept media coded for regions 1-8 inclusive'. My Samsung HD950 hasn't coughed at a DVD yet, though I wouldn't recommend this unit particularly (if you could find on) as it has a few irritating quirks.

French DVDs/TV Sound

An interesting article, but begging for a Part II.

French DVDs. The video on DVDs is not stored in PAL, NTSC or SECAM, it's digital component (525 or 625 line for standard definition). The PAL/SECAM bit is only applied after decoding for the composite output. Therefore all French DVDs will play just fine with any 625 line TV. Of course for video tape, it is actually recorded in SECAM, and you need a SECAM TV or converter.

Re moving TVs around. You also need to watch the sound channel spacing. This varies a bit even within Europe. Without changing some of the circuits in your TV you will end up with a picture but not sound, or sound but no picture.

With analogue switchoff approaching in many countries, how about something on digital TVs? Life here is much much harder than the "simple" analogue world. Different transmission technologies, different video encoding, different metadata, different interactive components, different scrambling... My advice is to use a cheap STB and feed component or HDMI into your set.

And then how about HD? Regular broadcasts in US, UK, Japan and Korea at least. And Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Pity the poor confused consumer...

More ripping utils

In addition to DVDdecrypter and DVDShrink, RipIt4Me is well worth a look, as it can bypass some of the newer encryption used on Sony titles (damn Sony and their piracy mantra and adverts - if I can't watch a film i've *paid* for without a brainwashing attempt i'll find another less profitable way [for Sony] to watch it !)

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/RipIt4Me

MPAAA make like harder don't they?

Thanks to MPAAA it is actually easier to download a title or rip to avi, then play it on your DVD divx player from a DVD which can now have several films on it.

Bonuses :

1. You control what your own dvd does.

2. No farcical claims of pirates funding terrorism, or any other lies the MPAAA wish to propagate.

3. No adverts.

4. Cost

5. No region problems

6. No format problems

7. Reduced storage space

8. Reduced waste - 1 disk replacing several, no packaging - A greener solution.

9. If you want to travel with films - put them on disk, HDD, or usb-drive - save space and weight.

All that is needed is a licensing model so you can pay the MPAAA thieves and keep them off your back.

DVDs are just too much hard work.

That's all very well BUT...

Passing through Cambridge last year bought a special edition classic John Boyd Hendrix double DVD doco (Region 2) for 8 quid coudn't pass it up...

now find myself living in New Mexcio wanted to show the wife on the recently purchased MacBook pro & the ol' Powerbook G4(locked in it's last Region 1 after 3years & no firmware hack for the UJ 835 drive to this day) & her ancient windows laptop

toshare my travails this week

-Wouldn't play on anything with or with out VLC in OS X Intel, PPC or XP as promised by many not with this DVD

didn't want to use up my 5 chances like the powerbook so:

hit the forums...started to get obsessed, you know how it is the bastards... I can do thisI said, give me enough time: they say it can be done using all of

on the macBook Pro

- tried ripping it with DVD Backup... which locked & crashes

- ripped succesfully with MacTheRipper but with Bad Sectors so no play back, several times over (Zero sector hack?)

-tried Handbrake couldn't find valid title on several attempts: so no rip

OK so with various combos of the MacTheRipper file & the DVD itself:

-en français, tried D-Vision 3 for 3.5 hours couldn't finsih & all out put would not play

-tried YadeXnoCSS crashes & shugged away seemed promising the

single VOB wouldn't play in anything gave up

-tried OSEx seemed promising; instant crashes on starting the rip

-tried ffmpegX, dowloaded the weird compiled hacks seemed promising; none of the 5 compressed output types would display anything in quicktime

at this point exhuastion set in, thought I'd check the price of the region 1 version from amazon:

5 bucks + $2 shipping! I felt like an idiot at this point

defeated in the time alloted I hit the one-click purchase after the equivalent of 10 hours at the problem over a night & day, what's your time worth?

but problem solved

hey at least I know how to extract individual viles off a DVD in principle wasn't all a complete waste of time

~:^)

I've been doing this since 1999

Bought my first DVD discs in 1999 before I even had a player.... I had R1/R2/R3 discs.... bought a hackable player and never looked back. When it broke bought another. etc.

Is it really newsworthy?

Oh, boy...

There is always one like this... The pedantic showoff who said that...

"Eletrical current, measured in amps or amperes (not volts), is a measure of how electrons are affected by an applied voltage and is globally identical. Utility voltage is what varies around the planet."

...should also have noticed that the frequency of the alternating current also varies according to region: some are 50 Hz, some are 60 Hz...

If you're going to be anal, at least do it properly!

Cheers

J

FairMount for MacOSX

I've used FairMount to load differing region DVDs on my Powerbook G4 (whose DVD drive has no known region hack). It works well, and is available free (you download it with another app which costs).

I then use Drive Utility to make a DVD master of it. Further compression can be done if desired with many possible tools.

Standalone DVD Player Mods

Some mod kits include just a tiny PIC microcontroller that switches a player to a region free mode, see http://dvdupgrades.ch/mods.html

failing economy? consume locally, waste globally

Thanks to mind programming while in college through hours of Dr Who and Monty Python I am hopelessly addicted to Brit TV. BBC America is as bad as Hollyweird controlling what I can watch.

Thank you Amazon for offering a world-wide bazaar that allows me to shop in the UK and other outlets internationally.

Thank you MasterCard/Visa for converting my daddy warbucks to euro-monoply monies.

Thank you international postal treaties that get the digital blobs of overpriced plastic to me in reasonable time.

Thank you big and little tigers for building a basic cheap DVD player for a world hungry for something different to watch. And cheap LCD tvs that display the same. Thank you Wal-Mart for colonizing the planet so we can buy this junk locally. Thank you Pentagon for subsidizing the invention of the internet so knowledge is mostly free and easy.

I wonder what I'd be buying today if there'd been chip and ka-bab shops in Oklahoma?

de-regioning

Although I've now seen DVD drives in PC that have no region work-around (specifically dual-layer Matsushita/Matshita DVD/RW-RAM drives in Sony laptops) I've never been unable to play DVDs in a Samsung or LG DVD player.

A good site for PC DVD region issues is rpc1.org

;-)

The digital TV world isn't that complicated

Actually the digital TV world isn't that complicated. There are basically three families of standards. DVB is used in Europe, Australia and a couple of other countries. DVB-T is an excellent standard for over-the-air TV, DVB-S is pretty much the same thing, but for satellites, and DVB-C is used on many cable networks all over the world. These are the basic transport layers, and any receiver that claims to support DVB will work in any DVB network. DVB-T is mostly used for free-to-air programming, so encryption is not a problem in most countries. The BBC is currently trialling some extensions to DVB-T for broadcasting HDTV, including using H.264 encoding (DVB usually uses MPEG2). DVB-T was a very advanced standard for its day, where its day was the late nineties; this made early receivers very expensive. However, intrepid chip designers soon made it really cheap. DVB has a market of about a billion people at present. DVB-T defines a presentation layer and can be cheaply implemented; other DVB standards are more usually used in closed-box receivers like Sky boxes (which are DVB-S or DVB-S2 receivers with a proprietary middleware layer and encryption) and Swissfun receivers (used in Switzerland, these are DVB-C cable boxes with a similarly customised software environment).

The second group of standards is ATSC, which is used in the USA for over-the-air HDTV and also some HDTV cable services. It is really only used in the USA. It is a cheap standard for the mostly non-organized US bandplan where Single Frequency Network operation is not as desirable as cheap receivers; sadly because most everyone else chose one of the other standards, it's actually much more expensive than it would otherwise be.

The third group of standards is the Japanese ISDB-T, which is similar to DVB-T. It's almost compatible but not quite. ISDB-T makes a slightly different set of design decisions to DVB-T, but works substantially in the same way.

All of these standards carry MPEG-2, MPEG-4 or H.264 video in one of the standard sizes, and all of them are usually decoded by a cheap receiver, so there's no real reason to worry about your TV being multi-region; as long as it can do 50 and 60 Hz and at least 525 and 625 lines, you're golden. Any HDTV worth its salt should offer this.

Have TV, will travel - not to Spain

The analogue broadcasts in Spain do not use the same frequency combinations for sound and video as the UK. All TVs brought from the UK can only receive the picture and need to be "fixed" by a local TV shop which usually charges around 50 Euros.

Of course the Brits usually don't bother to learn Spanish or watch local TV so it is often not a problem

UOP not mentioned

The last piece of the puzzle is "UOP" or 'user override' .

This has nothing to do with travelling around the world, but hey, while we're at hacking our players so that they do what WE tell them, rather than what MPAA would prefer, we might as well deal with UOP too.

GettinSadda mentioned the frustration at sitting through anti-piracy propaganda, ads or trailers without any way of skipping it, even if you've seen it a million times already. That's UOP, and yes, it can often be disabled, so that you can fast forward past the Universal ident or the trailier for some crap film you'll never watch.

So... when you're hunting for region-free hacks for your player (or for the player you are considering buying), be sure to look out for a UOP hack too!

UOP/region free players?

I for one would be *very interested* in finding a supplier of stand alone DVD players that have had the depressingly irritating features of "user operation prohibited" and region coding disabled.

It is high time that a review of copyright law made such activities illegal under ‘fair use’ of the media that you have actually paid for!

Ultimately that is the stupidity of most DRM, that if you want to be able to use your *own* legal copy as you could reasonably expect to, they won’t let you, so it is a better experience in the end to find an ‘illegal’ source for what you were willing to pay for.

I dont believe this..

This is El Reg, supposedly a tech savvy site and Im reading a lot of comments that were made 5 years ago !

The encryption on DVD's was busted so long ago that this article has no relevance. Rip, Re-encode and Burn is the mantra that has existed for so long that this whole debate is meaningless.

Re: I dont believe this..

In reply to Graham Lockley's advice to "Rip, Re-encode and Burn", there are two points here:

1) Technically that is illegal in most of Europe, while modifying a player to ignore such restrictions as region encoding UOP is not.

2) I would like such a 'useful' stand alone DVD player for my parents, who are not "tech savvy" and unwilling to do that sort of thing for every disk they are irritated by.

So anyone who knows of a supplier, please post a reply.

Region Free

I have my solution to this multi-format / multi-region crap.. www.oppodigital.com

I am in no way associated with them...

I just have two of their DVD players.. both excellent.. DV971H and DV981HD.. just search for all region service code on the web.. type it in. and you are all set.

Might be a little bit pricey for a DVD player.. but you also get decent DVD-Audio and SACD player (981HD only). Both have built in Faroudja chipset for upscaling to 1080i (DV971H) / 1080p (DV981HD) and by typing the simple service code you can set this player to region 0 and it will play any region.. and it can also convert the output signal to NTSC or PAL... does not matter.. and the video output is just plain excellent. It does NTSC 3:2 pull down and PAL 2:2 pull down.. so no hickups/interlacing lines on upscaled video...

Since I got this player I never looked back.. It plays everything.. and it also supports 100-240V 50/60Hz... so it will work anywhere.

and their tech support is just excellent..

Sorry for this "sales pitch" but I just love these players...

Region Coding is Racism

As has been said before, region coding feeds piracy by encouraging otherwise honest people to modify their equipment or rip and modify their media at which time they usually also gain the ability to copy the material as well. I work in a mixed US/UK environment and I would never have dreamed of tampering with my player if the only thing it did was to enable copying. To be able to play more than half our DVD library, however, made it worth the trouble. Don't get me started on PUOs either...

I consider region coding to be a form of racism which really has no place in a civilised society in the Internet age (I'll call it "geographical racism" unless somebody has a better term.) If I opened a store that sold DVDs and put up a big sign that said "DVDs - American Customers £9.99, Europeans £17.99, Africans and Asians come back in 6 months" I am sure I would end up in court being prosecuted on some racial discrimination charge (assuming the public hadn't lynched me before hand.) This is however exactly what the media companies are allowed to do. In fact, not only is this racism legal it is enshrined in law. This probably isn't surprising considering that my government makes no sales tax if I buy something in another country and bring it home and that my ability to do so dilutes their power to "protect" me from things they haven't censored/classified as fit for me, even though the American government thinks them fit for their citizens.

The world is growing up. People are travelling more and want to be able to buy things legitimately and watch them wherever they are. It's about time the politicians we elected and the MPAA realised that.

As for the argument that piracy funds organised crime and that I should be horrified with what may be done with the money if I buy a pirate title, I am horrified about what is done with my money when I buy a legitimate one; This money is being used to buy laws, distort democracy, impede innovation and sue 12 year old girls. I am funding a propaganda machine against my own interests.

Just my 22p...