[P1] DVD region codes?

[George Slusher]

>You may disagree with them (and mostly this seems to be because they 
>inconvenience you), but there are quite reasonable explanations for why 
>the system was put into place. Apart from the different theatrical 
>"windows" in place worldwide (where a DVD release in one country may 
>come before the theatrical release in another), seperate distribution 
>agreements may govern material in different parts of the world. (Most 
>companies wouldn't want to put too much money into licensing material 
>if they knew it could be easily imported and sold to their audience.) 
>In fact, without region coding and encryption, I doubt the major 
>studios would have embraced the DVD format at all.

Very good points, especially the last. There was great resistance among 
the studios to DVDs because the quality is so good: they were afraid that 
they would easily be copied. FWIW, the same reasoning applied to digital 
camcorders. Ever notice that an 8mm digital tape only holds 1 hour, 
whereas an analog camcorder can record 2 hours on the SAME tape? The 
reason is simple: the studios didn't want people being able to copy a 
movie onto digital tape, so there was an agreement to limit the capacity 
of a digital tape to 1 hour. (I don't know what the situation is with the 
newer mini-DV camcorders.)

There are other reasons, of course. DVDs made for different regions often 
have different languages. Asian DVDs will often have Chinese and 
Japanese, rather than, say, French and Spanish. There are also copyright 
issues. There's no such thing as a worldwide copyright: copyright laws 
and their enforcement vary dramatically between nations. (That's one of 
the hangups on increasing trade between the US and EU, on one hand, and 
China on the other. China is notorious for lax enforcement of copyright 
laws. I've read that it's easy to get pirated software from China in 
places like Singapore.) 

Fans of some TV shows, like Stargate SG-1, know that the DVDs of the 
shows are usually available in Australia, UK, Europe, etc., long before 
they are released in the US--by "long," I mean as much as a year or even 
two years. SG-1's third season just came out on DVD in the US; the 
*FIFTH* season is available in the UK & Australia. (They're currently in 
their seventh season.) I, and other fans, based upon various websites & 
discussion groups, think that this is because the program's owners and 
distributors want to preserve the syndication value of reruns. Fox and 
UPN are currently running the sixth season--they're always a year behind 
Sci-Fi (and formerly Showtime), plus other earlier episodes. The Sci-Fi 
Channel is also running the complete series, from start to today, 4 
episodes/week. (They've already been through the first 5 seasons once and 
have started over again. It's a cheap filler, I guess, as the show is 
very popular.)


>Besides which, there's /already/ a system very much like region coding 
>in place that has traditionally restricted the material that can be 
>played in different regions without specialised equipment; incompatable 
>television standards. Your friend would likely need a player capable of 
>transcoding the signal from SECAM (if I'm not mistaken) to NTSC to play 
>his French DVD in the US. (Most of those end up set to bypass region 
>coding, anyway.)

Are you sure? It's my impression that DVDs are not NTSC, SECAM or PAL. 
They contain digital data. The only difference between the Regions is the 
regional coding. It is the PLAYER that converts the digital data to 
signals that the TV can use. As an example, the same DVD region covers 
all of Europe, though the UK uses PAL and France uses SECAM.

As for the "legal" issues, perhaps someone who think sthat DVD encoding 
is illegal can cite a specific Federal statute (or equivalent law outside 
the US), treaty, or Constitutional provision. As Brian said, it seems 
that some people think that anything that is inconvenient for them is, by 
necessity, illegal.

George Slusher/Eugene, OR
gslusher at rio.com