2003-12-22 - 11:22 p.m.

DVD region codes suck. They were invented and introduced by the movie industry.

For a customer, it brings nothing good. If you have a US bought DVD player, you won't be able to see your European, Japanese, African, any non-North American movies with it. You can't buy (movie) DVDs as your holiday souvenirs, or you can't just buy DVDs from other countries that have never been released in your country. If you have movies from 2 or more regions, you are screwed. You need more than one DVD player, or a region free one.

The movie industry's greediness was behind it. E.g. all Disney animations come out in the Americas (North and South) always around June or July.

They are out on DVDs around October. Those movies come always in the cinema in Europe around Christmas., in UK a few weeks earlier than other coutnries, still we are talking about time like November. If there was no region codes, I guess the movie industry could not wait that long before releasing those movies in Europe - the sole purpose of releasing animations around Christmas is that you can get the whole family to the cinema, and the European kids will be demanding all those cartoon charachter branded crap for Christmas presents. Finding Nemo pillows, underpants, socks, pens, toothbrushes, bags, anything. They don't want to risk the European kids having shorter memory - forgetting by the Christmas that they wanted all that stuff. If there were no region codes, you could buy the movies from Amazon no matter where you live, before the dubbing in your language has been completed and the movie is in cinema. Would that make people not going to the cinema? If it's a good movie, it will always look better on a movie screen.

Different movie companies own the rights for the movie in different countries. That has been used as one reason for the codes. But hey - different companies own the right for music too. With that same excuse you CDs that were not published in your country would simply be unlistenable in your cd player. If that would exist, I can imagine the prices of the CDs be a lot higher in many countries.

The DVD regions do not do anything about the piracy. It just prevents you from seeing your legal DVDs in your own player, if your player thinks they are from the wrong region.

I have a pile of European = region 2 coded movies. And there is a huge collection of US = region 1 coded ones. The normal dvd player or p/s 2 don't play the Europe coded ones - so either I see them on a 12" Powerbook screen, or just give up and look for the region free solution.

The computers don't play movies of all regions either. A Mac allows you to switch the region for 5 times, then it would stuck to whatever region used last, and be stuck on that forever. I think that is unfair - it is mentioned nowhere in the packages or booklets. But it can't be any different from pcs. There are though some firmware hacks that can be performed to make more switches, but I would never use those. First, it can make your dvd player unusable. Repairing it is expensive .. so to have a look on your computer in a service, costs you at least as much as a cheap region free player does. Well - recently I heard > that VLC player (videolan client for OS X) would play DVDs of any region, without changing the region settings. I'm afraid to try even that - what if it still does? Some told that Macs have always used only software based DVD players, so I guess if it is so, it could be possible. I just don't want to risk messing with it.

Before Amazon US sold region free or multi region or World DVD players, however you want to call them. Now I see only Amazon UK does. They sell them cheap, cheapest models being around 30-40 £, that's the same as the cheapest one regiond DVDs. Searching the players now in Amazon US gives weird results. "DVDs and CDs for dummies" and a lot of other books. No DVD players. Well - they did have a link to DVDoverseas.com. As the company is in Woodfield, not far from here (IL), and we needed one before Christmas, we drove there on friday and got one, a Daewoo (DVDP480). Fine, so now a Christmas can be spent watching foreign movies .. and maybe even VCDs if I find some.

If you are looking for a gift for a movie lover.. and he has only an old DVD player (or no DVD player yet), I think a region free DVD player is what would do perfect for you. :-)