TV and Film Audio

Here’s the 411 on Region Free DVD Players

For those of you that are clueless about region free DVD , let
me get you up to speed. Have you ever paid attention to that
little region number that’s printed somewhere on every movie DVD
that you buy or rent? Well, it seems that Hollywood, and other
major film producers around the world, cooked up this little
encoding scheme that’s supposedly designed to protect the
studios from having DVDs sold in countries where the original
film hasn’t been released in the theaters yet. But there’s more
behind the birth of the region free DVD player .

If you think about what the movie industry is claiming, it kind
of makes sense from their point of view. If Shrek II is done
playing in North America, but it hasn’t even opened in
Australia, then it would make sense that the producers wouldn’t
want the DVD being offered for rent or sale in the land down
under until they’ve cleaned up on selling movie tickets there.
However, there may be a more ominous reason behind these DVD
region codes and people are starting to investigate claims of
price fixing based upon which region is encoded on the DVD. It
remains to be seen if consumers are getting ripped off and what
role region free DVD players will have in thwarting that..

Anyway, regardless of who is ripping off whom, the DVD region
code barrier is starting to crumble under a direct assault by
the electronics industry and their latest weapon in the war
against Hollywood henchmen : The region free DVD player. .

How the region free DVD player works

The region free DVD player let’s you select from among the
world’s DVD regions so you can play any DVD regardless of which
region it was encoded for. There are 8 separate regions and each
one has their own DVD code so, unless you have a region free DVD
player, you’re stuck playing DVDs that were meant for release in
your particular country or region.

If you live in the U.S. or Canada, and you never go anywhere
else, then you probably couldn’t care less if you have a region
free DVD player or not. Unless, of course, you have a taste for
foreign films which may never be released in your region. Here’s
the problem that the rest of the world faces:

I’ve already told you that the movie industry sees the region
code as a protective measure to offset the fact that the movie
studios do not release a DVD into all regions at the same time.
Sometimes they don’t even release a DVD into another region at
all! Region coding makes it impossible for you to purchase a DVD
on the Internet and play it in your home, if both the Internet
store and your home are not in the same region. So, as loudly as
Hollywood is screaming that region coding protects them from
loss, the DVD aftermarket sales and rental industry is screaming
that it’s killing them.

And that my friends is what motivated some major electronics
manufacturers to come up with the region free DVD player. You
simply set a switch to match the region setting on the DVD that
you’re about to play and that’s it. Your region free DVD player
handles everything from there so you can enjoy DVDs from
anywhere in the world.

The whole region free DVD thing isn’t just about the forces of
good vs. the forces of evil… I mean consumers vs. the film
industry, There are some business and scientific reasons why
region free DVD players are a good idea and one of them has to
do with some really sci fi stuff.

Is there a need for
interplanetary region free DVD players?

Well, almost. NASA has been making some serious inquiries about
the availability of region free DVD players and that makes a lot
of sense. With residents of the International Space Station
slated to come from practically all of the DVD regions, they are
either going to have to buy multiple DVD players from each
region, or grab themselves a bunch of region free DVD players.
You can imagine the entertainment role that watching DVDs on a
region free DVD player will have when you’re part of a team that
can’t drive out to the local theatre or down the street to DVD
Rental World.

Like all good ideas, the movie industry is dead against region
free DVD players. And while they haven’t struck a blow against
them yet, they have tried to kill an offshoot known as code-free
DVD players. These are modified DVD players where the entire
code sensing circuitry has been removed. These modified players
are usually sold on the gray, if not black, market and are
looked at by the movie industry the same way that the cable
industry views cable descramblers. In an effort to fight the
code-free DVD players the movie industry has come up with
Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE), which is a scheme that stops
Region 1 DVDs from playing on code-free DVD players. I’m
thinking that it’s going to be a bit more difficult for the
movie honchos to stop the region free DVD player since all of
the circuitry remains intact and the DVD just decides which
region code it has to emulate.

So, if you travel to other countries; if you have people from
other countries coming to see you; if you’re headed off to live
on the International Space Station; if you like Foreign Films;
or if you just want to give Hollywood the digital finger for yet
another attempt to stick their hands even deeper into your
pocket, then check out the latest line of region free DVD
players. They’re worth it.</p

A Johannesson
http://www.articlesbase.com/art-and-entertainment-articles/region-free-dvd-players-1220.html

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