On 8/27/2015 9:04 AM, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
Hi,
Nicolas George wrote:
There were the DVD drives by Matsushita, usually found on laptops, that did
refuse to return the encrypted contents if the region did not match.
This sounds plausible, although i would heavily complain
towards the seller if i ever found out. There is few chance
i would step into this puddle when recording and reading
own data.
Any good keywords to search for ?
All tries bring me to Macbook drives where it is hard to
distinguish between hardware and software. Of course if Apple
orders a shipload of drives with custom firmware add-ons,
then Matsushita will probably produce them.
There are whole online communities which have chosen
DVD cheating as their favorite sport. Something about:
"Matshita Flasher", a software without visible authorship,
and "RPC-1 good, RPC-2 bad".
I don't know what this "DVD cheating" stuff is about.
RPC-1, it was intended that all playback software be licensed, licensed
software had to honor the
region code. It was left up to the software to honor the region code or not.
RPC-2, commonly accessible software is available that does not care
about region code settings.
Initialization was changed so software does not have access to the
decryption functions if the
region code does not match taking the decision out of the hand of the
player software.
People who only watch DVDs for their region will never notice the change.
On the one hand, maybe it sounds perfectly reasonable that the big movie
producers should
be able to prevent playback of the larger percentage of DVD releases
that people might want to
watch that do not and will never have a release for their region based
on their desire to prevent
access to the smaller percentage of titles those big movie producers
want to prevent access to before
those movies have been released for a region.
On the other hand, DVD drives are cheap these days, as far as I know you
can still by a second drive
and set it to a different region code. One you have your backup copy
region is no longer an issue
so you can make a DVD that will play from your media center, copy to
your tablet, copy to a flash
stick and plug into the USB port on your TV or hardware based player,
etc.... so in effect all the
change really accomplishes is to be an annoyance to those of us who
really only care about being
able to play a DVD we actually paid for.
The people that produce a DVD and don't care about controlling access
based on region*could* release
a DVD in unecrypted form, in which case region does not come into play,
or set the disc as playable in
all regions.
I expect there are many DVD titles that are region restricted not
because the producers of those
titles want to prevent playback in other regions, but because the
producers had no plans on releasing
in another region and just never occurred them to think about the people
who through the internet
or other means purchase DVDs from sources not in their region.
I had an Australian show I was watching and the final season did not air
in the US, so it was purchased
on DVD, no mention of region restrictions, but turns out it was not set
for playback in region 1.
On a marginally related but not relevant note, that was at a time when
hooking a computer to a TV
was not so common, so a Windows desktop, a Linux desktop, and finally a
laptop or 2 later I was able to
find a combination that would put out a refresh rate the TV would
accept. Grrrr. ;)
Later, Seeker
