By A Johannesson
Here's the 411 on Region Free DVD Players
For those of you that are clueless about region free DVD , letme get you up to speed. Have you ever paid attention to thatlittle region number that's printed somewhere on every movie DVDthat you buy or rent? Well, it seems that Hollywood, and othermajor film producers around the world, cooked up this littleencoding scheme that's supposedly designed to protect thestudios from having DVDs sold in countries where the originalfilm hasn't been released in the theaters yet. But there's morebehind the birth of the region free DVD player .
If you think about what the movie industry is claiming, it kindof makes sense from their point of view. If Shrek II is doneplaying in North America, but it hasn't even opened inAustralia, then it would make sense that the producers wouldn'twant the DVD being offered for rent or sale in the land downunder until they've cleaned up on selling movie tickets there.However, there may be a more ominous reason behind these DVDregion codes and people are starting to investigate claims ofprice fixing based upon which region is encoded on the DVD. Itremains to be seen if consumers are getting ripped off and whatrole region free DVD players will have in thwarting that..
Anyway, regardless of who is ripping off whom, the DVD regioncode barrier is starting to crumble under a direct assault bythe electronics industry and their latest weapon in the waragainst Hollywood henchmen : The region free DVD player. .
How the region free DVD player worksThe region free DVD player let's you select from among theworld's DVD regions so you can play any DVD regardless of whichregion it was encoded for. There are 8 separate regions and eachone has their own DVD code so, unless you have a region free DVDplayer, you're stuck playing DVDs that were meant for release inyour particular country or region.
If you live in the U.S. or Canada, and you never go anywhereelse, then you probably couldn't care less if you have a regionfree DVD player or not. Unless, of course, you have a taste forforeign films which may never be released in your region. Here'sthe problem that the rest of the world faces:
I've already told you that the movie industry sees the regioncode as a protective measure to offset the fact that the moviestudios do not release a DVD into all regions at the same time.Sometimes they don't even release a DVD into another region atall! Region coding makes it impossible for you to purchase a DVDon the Internet and play it in your home, if both the Internetstore and your home are not in the same region. So, as loudly asHollywood is screaming that region coding protects them fromloss, the DVD aftermarket sales and rental industry is screamingthat it's killing them.
And that my friends is what motivated some major electronicsmanufacturers to come up with the region free DVD player. Yousimply set a switch to match the region setting on the DVD thatyou're about to play and that's it. Your region free DVD playerhandles everything from there so you can enjoy DVDs fromanywhere in the world.
The whole region free DVD thing isn't just about the forces ofgood vs. the forces of evil... I mean consumers vs. the filmindustry, There are some business and scientific reasons whyregion free DVD players are a good idea and one of them has todo with some really sci fi stuff.
Is there a need forinterplanetary region free DVD players?Well, almost. NASA has been making some serious inquiries aboutthe availability of region free DVD players and that makes a lotof sense. With residents of the International Space Stationslated to come from practically all of the DVD regions, they areeither going to have to buy multiple DVD players from eachregion, or grab themselves a bunch of region free DVD players.You can imagine the entertainment role that watching DVDs on aregion free DVD player will have when you're part of a team thatcan't drive out to the local theatre or down the street to DVDRental World.
Like all good ideas, the movie industry is dead against regionfree DVD players. And while they haven't struck a blow againstthem yet, they have tried to kill an offshoot known as code-freeDVD players. These are modified DVD players where the entirecode sensing circuitry has been removed. These modified playersare usually sold on the gray, if not black, market and arelooked at by the movie industry the same way that the cableindustry views cable descramblers. In an effort to fight thecode-free DVD players the movie industry has come up withRegional Coding Enhancement (RCE), which is a scheme that stopsRegion 1 DVDs from playing on code-free DVD players. I'mthinking that it's going to be a bit more difficult for themovie honchos to stop the region free DVD player since all ofthe circuitry remains intact and the DVD just decides whichregion code it has to emulate.
So, if you travel to other countries; if you have people fromother countries coming to see you; if you're headed off to liveon the International Space Station; if you like foreign films;or if you just want to give Hollywood the digital finger for yetanother attempt to stick their hands even deeper into yourpocket, then check out the latest line of region free DVDplayers. They're worth it.
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