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Useless Regional DVD Codes
by Paul G. Schreier, Contributing Editor

With the holiday shopping season upon us, I expect that many of you will be looking at a DVD player. I haven't seen formal market numbers recently, but I suspect that there are as many DVD players in homes today as there are VCRs, if not more. The advantages of DVDs over videotapes are too numerous and well-known to mention. But those of you in the U.S. might not be aware of a major annoyance that those of us overseas run into—regional coding. What reminded me of this issue is chatting with a friend who has a DVD player in his van to keep the five kids (all ten and under) occupied during long rides. During a recent trip to Italy he got tired of hearing the audio of the same movies over and over and over again, so he purchased a new DVD. On the drive back to Zurich he put the new disk in the machine and got a message similar to "This disk is not formatted for this region…" In other words, it wouldn't play. He had not only wasted his money, even worse he and his wife ended up hearing Cinderella a few more times.

So what's going on? At a movie distributor's discretion, a DVD may contain a regional code that prevent its playback except in the corresponding region enabled in the DVD player. The world has been broken up into six DVD regions. As you might assume, if you buy a player in the U.S. (Region 1) and all your DVDs come from North America, there's no problem. But if you purchase a player in Europe (Region 2) and try to play a DVD that somebody back in the U.S. sent you as a gift, you're generally out of luck. This is the method studios and other video distributors use to control how their IP is being exported. For example, while a feature film might have played theatrically in the U.S. and been released to the home video market, that same film might not yet have hit theaters on other continents. Having DVDs crossing the Atlantic would obviously hurt ticket sales. You can read the Motion Picture Association of America's party line on the philosophy of regional coding at www.mpaa.org/Press/DVD_FAQ.htm.

Meanwhile, this coding can be a huge pain for some consumers. For example, I want to be able to go to the local DVD rental place here in Zurich and get movies; my daughter wants to borrow U.K. titles from her school friends; and when we come for a visit to the U.S. during the holidays we plan on stocking up on the blockbuster movies we've missed in the past year or so. And suppose somebody in the U.S. would like to view a foreign film that never got a domestic U.S. release; those DVDs won't play on the standard player either.

The answer to this problem is to turn to the relatively large cottage industry that has grown up to defeat regional coding. Through the Internet I learned of a store not far from my home, www.dvdupgrades.ch/—the site is in English, and besides a list of players and prices, it's got some interesting stuff explaining the technology they have developed to make mods on various machines. Because the shop is only a half-hour drive, I went over to pick up a unit myself. I purchased a modified Pioneer player that detects the DVD region automatically and adjusts itself accordingly. It cost me an extra $65 for this feature, but it's well worth it for our needs.

The company works out of a garage, and you walk among stacks of boxed DVD players from various manufacturers. On the workbench are scopes and logic analyzers. I asked the sales guy if he gets many walk-in sales, and he said no. No surprise, from the outside you can't tell what's going on. Instead, most of his sales are either mail order, or the boxes go to the large electronics chains in the area. When somebody at a large retailer asks about a region-free player, salespeople reply that they can get one on special order.

This shop is just one of many, some of which are located in the U.S. Go on a search engine and enter region free DVD or code free DVD, and see how many hits you get—it's actually quite amazing. From what I gather, the equipment manufacturers are not allowed to sell region-free players without violating some laws or agreements, but they don't make it terribly difficult to implement the mods. It used to be that a few fancy clicks on the remote would do the job, but such easy software workarounds got the movie houses upset, so today you have to go to the trouble of doing a hardware mod. Or, for a few bucks you can go to the experts who know the quickest, easiest way to do it.

But why should we have to go through all this? Clearly, those who want to bypass the regional coding do so with little effort. Why don't the studios recognize that the harder they make it for the average person to get a movie, the more they encourage bootlegging and other illegal distribution. People want their entertainment, and they're going to get it one way or another. Especially when it comes to consumer electronics and content, it's a global community. Heck, there's a bootleg copy of Lord of the Rings II from the Far East floating around my kids' school, and it showed up two weeks before the U.S. general theatrical release. By ignoring rather than embracing new technologies, movie and music companies are slitting their own throats. Why don't they get it?

Meanwhile, there are lots of little companies doing a very nice business implementing DVD modifications that shouldn't be necessary to begin with—if only common sense prevailed.