Vista won't work with regionless DVD drives

[mobrien_12]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/01/01/1021218.shtml?tid=109&tid=188&tid=137

From a developer's blog, Windows Vista will no longer support DVD-ROM drives that do not handle region coding in hardware (RPC1 drives) - thus preventing playback of DVDs that are region/CSS encoded with those drives.

I'm lucky enough to have one of those drives, so I can watch any DVD's from Europe or Japan or America that I want.  But that pisses off the MPAA for some strange reason, and we all know Microsoft values the MPAA over the people who actually buy its software, so MS really doesn't want me as a customer.

Well, it's not like it makes any real difference to me.  I stopped buying MS software when they put activation in it.

[WMD]

I don't even understand the point of region encoding on DVDs - what exactly are they trying to accomplish?

[cymon]

It's so you can't buy cheap films from another country (China?) and play them in your country, you have to pay more.

[noob]

we will still have linux that will hapilly support all the stuff pista won't.

[piratePenguin]

It's so you can't buy cheap films from another country (China?) and play them in your country, you have to pay more.

What fucking asshole came up with that idea? He/She should be hung.

[Refalm]

Oh well, I'll give this security feature 20 minutes to last :rolleyes:

[cymon]

What fucking asshole came up with that idea? He/She should be hung.

I believe the MPAA, working with the hardware compaines, sony, etc. That's the thing that sucks about being in the US, is that everything is controlled by business, heck, even politics. So what they want, we get.

[worker201]

The funny thing is that people in other countries just sell rips of US dvds.  So if you have a region 1 player, you can play all the fun imported pirate stuff.

More interestingly, how will this move affect regionless dvds?  It's pretty much only porn stuff, but still - will those play in a Microsoft-controlled computer?

[KernelPanic]

More interestingly, how will this move affect regionless dvds?  It's pretty much only porn stuff, but still - will those play in a Microsoft-controlled computer?

It should have no effect, Microsoft's actions will only effect region-free hardware (RPC-1 drives).
Regionless DVD's themselves actually have a valid region code (region 0) and work within the system, regardless of whether the hardware is multi-region or locked.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Yet another reason NOT to got Vista ... that's 1,000,000,001 reasons and counting ...

[Annorax]

It should have no effect, Microsoft's actions will only effect region-free hardware (RPC-1 drives).
Regionless DVD's themselves actually have a valid region code (region 0) and work within the system, regardless of whether the hardware is multi-region or locked.

I believe that some time ago, I heard of DVD drives that allowed the user to set the region code and dynamically change it whenever they want. Was my source insane, or does such an animal exist and therefore by definition bypass this retarded "security" (of MPAA profits) feature?

[Lead Head]

you  can change the region code on computer DVD drives a maximum of 5 times

[Orethrius]

I believe that some time ago, I heard of DVD drives that allowed the user to set the region code and dynamically change it whenever they want. Was my source insane, or does such an animal exist and therefore by definition bypass this retarded "security" (of MPAA profits) feature?

 I remember hearing about this, too - and no, Lead Head, he doesn't mean standard changes (which can actually be reset, though the method escapes me).  One of the places I heard about it mentioned some method to modify the hardware to ignore region codes and just read the titles (which could also be altered so that the user could change the region code whenever they want to whatever they want).  Another method I heard was more obscure, and involved something along the lines of assigning an emulated drive to the same device driver as a physical DVD drive, taking care to only alter the region-code of the virtual drive as necessary.  It could then be unloaded and reloaded once the five changes were used up.  Again, I don't recall any of the sites offhand, and most of this is secondhand information, but I don't doubt that such methods exist somewhere.  

[mobrien_12]

RPC2 drives are locked to a region.  You can change the region five times.  

There are people who write unofficial patched firmware to convert some drives to RPC1 drives (which MS won't support anymore :fu: ).  You flash the drives and you have a regionless DVD-ROM drive now, if the firmware doesn't bork the drive.  

There are also similar "unofficial" firmware flashes for some drives to allow you to reset the codes many more times than those MPAA bastards want.  

The real reason behind the region controls is what all this "DRM" crap has been about since the beginning:  the big media companies want to take control of content away from the people they sell it to.

[worker201]

the big media companies want to take control of content away from the people they sell it to.

That's the thing about copyrighted content - even if you sell it, you don't "sell" it.  I paid to have a private copy of "The Two Towers", but I sure as heck don't own it in any sense of the word.