[H-GEN] DVD Legal Issues

[gearon at ieee.org]

Quoting Raymond Smith <raymond at humbug.org.au>:

> On Mon, May 30, 2005 at 12:28:05PM +1000, gearon at ieee.org wrote:
> > Name-brand players all enforce region coding.  You have to spend less money
> > to get a player that lets you change regions on your player, and even less
> > money again to get a player that will ignore regions.
>
> Admittedley I've only owned two DVD players but both my Pioneer and my
> LG work fine with Region 2 disks without any skull duggery despite the
> packaging loudly proclaiming their adherence to zone 4.

I've never heard of a Sony player that supported this (not saying they don't
exist, but the claim has been that they don't).  Of the other expensive brands,
they normally need to be "modded".

I've normally found with cheaper name brands (like Teac, LG, etc) that they
support a region changing feature, if you know the code to do it.  This is a
little annoying, but still works.

The best brands seem to be the $100 Chinese players.  These not only allow
multiple regions to be played, but they also let you turn of Macrovision (or
sometimes just don't have it), and also let you skip over copyright notices and
previews when the disc is inserted.  I've yet to see an expensive player support
that last feature.

Video playback on the cheap players is usually very good (sometimes not, but
I've only seen that on fast action sequences), and of course, they also have
digital sound output.  There's not a lot of argument to go for an expensive
brand name!

Regards,
Paul