Well, utopian life and the DVD may not coexist after all. I suppose next they will say Santa Claus is a marketing ploy.
DVD has been an available technology for some time, but politics have held back the release as content providers have tried to get protection. Sometimes this protection seems like a good screwing of the customer.
The DVD consortium has divided the world into six 'regions' as shown on this map. The USA and Canada make up region 1 while region 2 is essentially Japan, Europe and the Middle East. Australia is in region 4 with the rest of Oceania and South America. Every DVD player belongs to one region and every DVD disc has information encoded on it specifying which regions it can be played in. Players that comply with the DVD specification must refuse to play discs not intended for use in the player's region. There have been occasional rumours that Australia and New Zealand may be moved into region 2. So far I've seen nothing official and, now that the first region 4 players and discs have been produced, it's starting to look a little late to make the change.
The region code system has been set up for two main reasons. Firstly, movie studios like to stagger their releases so that a new movie might not arrive in Australia until several months after its North American premiere. Secondly, in some cases, the same films are distributed by different companies in different parts of the world. Either way, studios want to stamp out any 'grey marketing' whereby, e.g. Australians could order DVDs from Europe or North America in advance of or more cheaply than official Australian products.
Not surprisingly, consumers aren't impressed with this artificially imposed incompatibility and people are finding ways around the problem. So-called 'code-free' players do exist. One early Sony DVD player contained tiny switches inside which could be used to turn off region coding and copy protection features. Newer models lack these switches or have been programmed to ignore them.
Note that computer games and programs are code free.
Here's a link to where I took the above excerpt dvd.anu.edu.au and in this case, it's oriented toward Australia, but the information well worth reading.
Here's another link with more than you want on DVD unik.no
Regards,
Mark |
