Can someone please tell me why I can only change the region on my DVD Burner 5 times? Is it a marketing ploy? Is it to stop DVD pirating? If I spend good money buying a dvd burner isn’t it my right to be able to change the regions as many times as I like?
Could I change it to Region free or is there another way to get around this problem?
What will happen when I reach my limit? Will my head explode?
Thanks in advance for your help. Soryr for all the questions, it just seems a bit bizarre!
Basically, movie makers want to be able to release a movie 4 months later in the UK without everyone there already having seen the DVD beforehand. They also want to be able to charge you 20$ for that copy of Friends season 3, while charging people in China less than $1.50 without you being able to work that to your advantage.
Unfortunately, the companies who make the hardware are often owned by the companies that produce the content, which means it’s in their best interests to be unreasonable with respect to your DVD player.
There are some forums around that might have a firmware solution idea for your hardware. Alternately, since people playing DVDs in Linux had to crack the encoding to watch their own movies, there might be some software solution available there.
Your head might explode, but I understand that sort of thing is comparatively rare. What will certainly happen is that you can no longer change the region on your burner; it will be fixed at whatever you last set it to.
Is it to stop DVD pirating?
Yes.
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If I spend good money buying a dvd burner isn’t it my right to be able to change the regions as many times as I like?*
No.
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is there another way to get around this problem?*
Yes, but forum guidelines prevent the discussion of questionable legalities. Google is your friend if you want to burn any sort of DVD.
What will happen when I reach my limit?
The change region function will no longer work.
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Will my head explode?*
Probably not.
If you need to watch DVDs from only a couple of regions (say American and British ones) a simple and legal fix is to install two DVD-ROM drives in the computer, one set to Region 1 and the other set to Region 2.
Region-free recorder/players are available.
There is nothing at all illegal about changing a DVD player to play movies from different regions. In fact, region coding itself was challenged, unsucessfully (in Australia) as far as I know, as being an illegal restriction on fair trade.
Region-free firmware (or other region-code-defeating firmware) is in all likelihood available for any DVD drive that’s in a computer, which are also easier to flash than standalone players (i.e. reprogram). Modifying it in this way is pretty much certain to void the warranty, but it generally works.
For standalone DVD players, there are a some that have a code that unlocks all regions; some also have the same sort of limited-change option built into the drives used in PCs.
The later update to region coding, known as RCE (Region Code Enhancement) has a disc that pretends to be region-free under the old system, but once it tries to play actually checks the drive to see if it’s a region that matches what the DVD wants it to be. This is easier to defeat on a PC DVD drive than with a standalone player.
One further note on drives in a computer - even if you modify the drive to be region-free, the ‘player’ software sometimes checks the region as well, so you need to use software that doesn’t mind what region the disc is. VLC is a one option (good for Macs), there are probably many on Windows.
What would probably be illegal (at least in the USA) is to circumvent copy protection on the media (DVD) itself, even just to make it playable on your drive — that is, to take a disc and make/burn a copy that’s region-free. This would violate the DMCA. Well, maybe, anyway; I’m no lawyer, but there might be wiggle room around the ‘interoperability’ section of the law because that concerns access to content you legally have a right to (i.e. you own the disc).
And what a joke that is. They still put region coding on movies that were released 5, 10, 20, 50, or 100 years ago!
Even worse, they use region coding, and then only release the thing in one region! There’s a hilarious British comedy series by the name of Bottom that I wanted to get a few years back. After an hour or two on the net, I realized that the BBC had released it in Region 2, and Region 2 only. Why they didn’t use Region 0 (and thus let them sell the thing to anyone anywhere) is beyond me.
My Region 1 DVD set of Bottom works just fine in my DVD player.
Are you sure it’s your DVD player and not the software? There is plenty of freeware that gives you more freedom as to what you can do out there. For a start, check out doom9.net or videohelp.com.