On Fri, 27 Mar 2009, Thierry Chatelet wrote:
On 27 March 2009 16:45:22 Bret Busby wrote:Hello. As is shown by my signature, I am in Australia. Some of the DVD's of movies that I want to buy, are apparently available only from amazon, USA or UK. For whatever reason, multimedia DVD's have this horrid Region Code thing, apparently designed to stop Australian audiovisual DVD players from playing DVD's that are vavailable only from countries such as the USA or UK, that have Region Codes that are incompatible with DVD players for television sets.Fromhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=502554 , Region 1 - USA and Canada Region 2 - UK, Europe, Japan, South Africa and Middle East Region 4 - Australia, New Zealand, Central and South America Apparently, multimedia applications, such as Totem MPlayer, in Debian can play movies that are recorded on DVD's. Are these movie players able to read and play DVD's from any and all Region Codes, or, are they limited to particular region codes? I want to know that, before I start buying movies on DVD's from other Region Codes, so that I will not end up with movies on DVD's, that I cannot use. Thank you in anticipation. -- Bret Busby@ftc-p01:~$ aptitude search region p regionset - view and modify the region code of DVD dri Thierry
From Synaptic, for regionset;
"view and modify the region code of DVD drives Regionset is a small utility which displays and sets the region/zone setting of a DVD drive, allowing it to decrypt the DVD's sold in this geographical zone. Hardware vendors often limit the number of such modifications, but it is necessary to set it at least once with a brand new drive. URL: http://linvdr.org/projects/regionset/";
From http://linvdr.org/projects/regionset/ ;
"On delivery, most DVD drives have no region code set. The drive firmware allows you to change the region code, but on nearly all drives you are limited to five (5) changes. After the fifth change, the DVD drive will stay fixed on that code -- on some drives you can upgrade the drive firmware and have then additional five changes, on other drives you won't be able to change the region code any more."
and"If you set a DVD drive to region code 2 (RC2), you'll only be able to play region-code-2-DVDs from Europe, Middle East, South Africa and Japan -- the drive will definitively not play any US or Canadian DVD, nor Austrailian or Chinese. So if you cannot play a DVD because of the wrong region code, there is nothing the DVD player software can do about but changing the region code of the drive if you have any changes left.
So always be very very careful changing the region code, it could be your last try before you're forced to buy a new drive (or play foreign DVDs forever)."
So, it appears that this proprietary and restrictive Regions Code thing is absolute, and cannot be got around, and I apparently just have to accept that the video companies don't want us to watch their DVD's here in Australia.
Thank you, anyway. -- Bret Busby Armadale West Australia .............. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means." - Deep Thought, Chapter 28 of Book 1 of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy In Four Parts", written by Douglas Adams, published by Pan Books, 1992 ....................................................