Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:
On Sun, 2006-03-19 at 10:13 -0500, Bruce Marshall wrote:
On Sunday 19 March 2006 09:48, James Knott wrote:
It would be nice if that regional coding had an expiry date. For example a DVD could be played anywhere 2 years after release. This would accomodate such market protection, while allowing full use of purchased DVDs. As it stands now, what happens when someone buys several DVDs and moves to a different area? If they move from Europe to North America, they'll likely have to buy a new player and won't be able to play their movies.
Most players will allow you to change the region code.... up to 5 times.
Why so limited? Why have more? How many people do you know of that have moved to a different region more than 5 times?
I cannot see how encoding a DVD protects a consumer. The fact is that if I buy the DVD, the issuing company gets their slice of the profit. Why must I buy another of the same DVD if I move regions? The only benefit of region encoding seems to be that it 'prevents' unsuthorised mass counterfeit production, however counterfeits are still made even with the encoding. That of course and the DVD issuing company being greedy for more profit. Hasn't the region decoding been cracked yet and made available to the open source community(DECSS or summit)? When can we expect to see it in SuSE?