{"id":1790,"date":"2010-02-04T16:41:13","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T06:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/?p=1790"},"modified":"2010-02-03T16:51:12","modified_gmt":"2010-02-03T06:51:12","slug":"anti-anti-features-region-coding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/04\/anti-anti-features-region-coding\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-anti-features: region coding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>DVD anti-features are rather well documented. The purpose of &#8220;region coding&#8221; was to make sure that everybody who ever visited a foreign country and picked up some DVDs while there would get home to find out that they wouldn&#8217;t work.<\/p>\n<p>Luckily, those of us who pay good money for DVDs have free software solutions to let us used our payed for product and not force us to download &#8220;pirated&#8221; copies just so we can view <strong>what we payed for<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>The region coding in DVDs was designed with the idea that DVD players would always be expensive. You could &#8220;change&#8221; which region your DVD player was in a set number of times before you could no longer change it.<\/p>\n<p>DVD players can now be bought for $30 (or less). This is what you could pay for a DVD movie. So with economies of scale driving prices down, even if CSS wasn&#8217;t completely broken, you can brute force the region coding by just buying 6 DVD players ($180) &#8211; less than many of us payed for our first, second or third DVD player.<\/p>\n<p>The same thing will happen with BluRay. You can now get BluRay players for a couple of hundred dollars. One for each of the regions (A, B and C) will cost you less than original BluRay players cost.<\/p>\n<p>So the antifeature of limiting who can watch a DVD\/BluRay release is easily broken as player costs come down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>DVD anti-features are rather well documented. The purpose of &#8220;region coding&#8221; was to make sure that everybody who ever visited a foreign country and picked up some DVDs while there would get home to find out that they wouldn&#8217;t work. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/04\/anti-anti-features-region-coding\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[221,227,226],"class_list":["post-1790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-antifeatures","tag-blueray","tag-dvd"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5a6n8-sS","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1788,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/03\/anti-anti-features-copyright-notices\/","url_meta":{"origin":1790,"position":0},"title":"Anti-anti-features: copyright notices","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2010-02-03","format":false,"excerpt":"Mako has often talked very well about anti-features. The \"features\" in software that nobody wants and often cost money to do the easier task of not including the feature. Examples include the non-skip parts of DVDs and BluRay Discs (see here for more). I'd like to coin a new term...\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;General&quot;","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":875,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/02\/backup-solution-for-mum\/","url_meta":{"origin":1790,"position":1},"title":"Backup solution for mum&#8230;","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2007-08-02","format":false,"excerpt":"Dear Lazyweb, I really want a GNOME application with a big button that says \"backup\" and proceeds to ask for a series of DVDs, on which it writes out everything on the hard disk (\/ and \/home) which can then (relatively easily) be used to restore the system. I figure\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;GNOME&quot;","block_context":{"text":"GNOME","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/gnome\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1796,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/22\/anti-features-mean-pirates-get-all-the-good-things\/","url_meta":{"origin":1790,"position":2},"title":"Anti-features mean pirates get all the good things","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2010-02-22","format":false,"excerpt":"Spotted on Boing Boing: The worst is renting... the amount of times you have to press skip (or the damn disc doesn't work) you do start to wonder if you would have had a much better user experience if you just downloaded it instead.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;General&quot;","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/i.imgur.com\/GxzeV.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/i.imgur.com\/GxzeV.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/i.imgur.com\/GxzeV.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/i.imgur.com\/GxzeV.jpg?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":467,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2005\/09\/06\/tricks-for-playing-dvds\/","url_meta":{"origin":1790,"position":3},"title":"tricks for playing DVDs","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2005-09-06","format":false,"excerpt":"$ aptitude install regionset (and then run it) also, $ rm -rf ~\/.dvdcss now it all works. Without doing regionset, I was getting read errors from the drive.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;General&quot;","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":935,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/21\/twitter-updates-for-2007-11-21\/","url_meta":{"origin":1790,"position":4},"title":"Twitter Updates for 2007-11-21","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2007-11-21","format":false,"excerpt":"Marx Brothers on DVD. awesome. I gt to watch Monkey Business again # thinking of election night party.... # Powered by Twitter Tools.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Twitter&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Twitter","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/from-twitter\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":681,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2006\/04\/27\/mike-hillyer%e2%80%99s-laptop-melting-and-backup-fun-at-uc\/","url_meta":{"origin":1790,"position":5},"title":"Mike Hillyer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s laptop melting and backup fun at UC","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2006-04-27","format":false,"excerpt":"Mike Hillyer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Personal Web Space \u00c2\u00bb Blog Archive \u00c2\u00bb It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Alive!! Mike's laptop went funny, but he had a backup of his presentation. So, something about my backup strategy. I have a policy that anything that I really care about is backed up. If it's not backed up, I don't\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;cool gadgets&quot;","block_context":{"text":"cool gadgets","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/cool-gadgets\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1791,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790\/revisions\/1791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}