[ILUG-Social] Hackin' DVD Regions

[Colm Buckley]

> What's the story with deregionalizing a DVD player?  Is it a
> standard operation or does it vary from model to model?  I'm looking
> at one which is Region2...

It varies from model to model.  Some players simply are "stuck" in one
region and won't be able to play other regions without a hardware
modification ("chipping").  Techtronics in the UK
(http://www.techtronics.com/) sell chip kits for many players, but
many of these require soldering, and they'll invalidate your warranty.

Other models have a "secret" menu which allows the region to be set
using a remote control (sometimes a different remote control to the
one which comes with it...)

I'd echo the earlier recommendation of the Scan SC-2000 player; my
second player is one of those and it's a great little box - easily
multi-region, dts decoding, and it plays ISO9660 CDRs full of MP3s
(having my entire Divine Comedy collection on a single CDR is dead
handy)...

Someone mentioned RCE - this is a new type of protection which some
DVD software producers have adopted in an attempt to defeat
de-regioned players.  DVD discs contain programs in a simple
instruction set which includes operations like "display this image",
"play this video sequence", "wait for a keypress" and, crucially,
"check player for region N".  The "old" region mechanism just had the
disc ask "check player for region 1" (say), and would refuse to
continue if the player answered "no".  Most deregioned players got
around this by just always answering "yes" to every "check player for
region N" question.  However, RCE on newer disks not only refuses to
continue if the player answers "no" to "check for region 1", but
*also* refuses to continue if the player answers "yes" to "check for
region 2", "check for region 3" etc...  so the newest RCE-defeating
players are "region-settable" in that you can happily flip between
regions for each disc...

Anyway.  The scan one is good, and it's about 150 quid sterling plus
vat and shipping.  http://www.scan.co.uk/sc-2000.htm, I think.

         Colm

-- 
Colm Buckley BA BF | NewWorld Commerce, 44 Westland Row, Dublin 2, Ireland
colm at tuatha.org (personal) | colm.buckley at nwcgroup.com (business)
+353 87 2469146 | whois cb3765 | http://www.tuatha.org/~colm/
Pointy clicky.  Pointy clicky.  Pointy crashy.  Crashy crashy.  All blue.