Now so far no piece of software has offered me the choice of setting the region of the player. The player is an OEM one,
:-/ Mine seems ready to play region 1 and 2 interchangeably without any problems. I'm sure I've played both more than 5 times.
Steve- What terminal o/p do you get?
On Monday, July 22, 2002 9:20 AM, Ricardo Campos wrote:
Now so far no piece of software has offered me the choice of setting the region of the player. The player is an OEM one,
:-/ Mine seems ready to play region 1 and 2 interchangeably without any problems. I'm sure I've played both more than 5 times.
Unfortunately, with my dodgey hardware, I end up reinstalling Windows quite often. I have noticed that with my old PC (in which I installed a DVD Player soon after they first came out) I have to reset the region each time I reinstall, whereas with this new PC it seems to retain its region between installs. My limited experience therefore suggests to me that when they first came out DVD players were dumb and the region was stored within, and handled by, the playback software itself; whereas with modern DVD players the region seems to be stored within the firmware on the DVD player unit itself. If so it means that old DVD players are probably inherently dumb and multi-region when used with non Windows software whereas new DVD players need to be programmed to a region before use. Has anyone else noticed this??
Ian.
On Mon, 22 Jul 2002 10:00:49 Ian Douglas wrote:
Unfortunately, with my dodgey hardware, I end up reinstalling Windows quite often. I have noticed that with my old PC (in which I installed a DVD Player soon after they first came out) I have to reset the region each time I reinstall, whereas with this new PC it seems to retain its region between installs. My limited experience therefore suggests to me that when they first came out DVD players were dumb and the region was stored within, and handled by, the playback software itself; whereas with modern DVD players the region seems to be stored within the firmware on the DVD player unit itself. If so it means that old DVD players are probably inherently dumb and multi-region when used with non Windows software whereas new DVD players need to be programmed to a region before use. Has anyone else noticed this??
Yes, there are two levels of region protection, RPC-I (old-style) where the region enforement is done in the PC software, i.e. the DVD drive itself is multi-region, and RPC-II where the DVD drive enforces it. I think RPC-II must be a reaction to DeCSS.
The region of an RPC-II drive can be changed from the PC, but the firmware limits how many times this may be done (so you don't just re-program it each time you watch a disk from another region).
Even with RPC-II it seems the PC software need to know the correct region too, though it can probably ask the drive, because it still have to do the CSS decode.
There seem to be patches available for the firmware to some drives that return them to RPC-I operation.
Steve.
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Ian Douglas -
Ricardo Campos -
Steve Fosdick