Dear Sriharsha, Thank you,I bow to your blessed self.You don't have be so hard on this poor soul.
You believe, I sinned by bringing filth into this scared hall. Before you drive me away with chalice of holy water, Wait, think who gave you the right to brand me a sinner.
--Arky, The Impossible Imp
Anything that curtail __my freedom__ in the digital world is problem, if you read the content of the article you will understand that its quite unfair for the hardware vendors to limit the number of regional (geographical zone) settings.
Well, am totally disgusted with your apathy towards my email and will consider you just as bad the companies take our money and our freedom with it.
--arky
--- Sriharsha sriharsha.v@redpinesignals.com wrote:
Hello,
First of all, I would put that this is totallyun-related to FREE-SOFTWARE-FOUNDATION (fsf for short), and I did not understand why you posted it here. If you were trying to enlighten people that the region-restrictions exist on DVD's, thank you for the trouble, but the fact is that, they have been so almost from the advent of the technology and everyone knows about it. Still, if you are frustrated about it, you got two options:
- Upgrade your DVD's firmware using a hacked
version (available on the net). Dont forget to make a back-up copy, in case you screw up things, you would need to restore it back to the original contents.
- As long as you dont rip the hardware and break
the seals, and present the pc as you received it from the dealer (save a few scratches :-) ), you need not worry about warranty. Unless, they have some extremely superb mechanism, they would'nt know if you changed the firmware and later re-loaded the original one. So, you are safe to play with it. Afterall, "you follow all the rules, you miss all the fun".....
Im not sure if the above points would raise criticisms, but Im sick of the support guys, who dont understand half of what you say and try parrot-talk of a closely suitable answer that they have in-front of their screens.
Or, if you are still scared abt your warranty, get yourself an external DVD-ROM drive and hack its firmware.
This too (my reply) is definately off topic. So, I wouldnt elaborate further.
Harsha.
Rakesh 'arky' Ambati wrote:
Dear Friends,
This article mentions mostly Apple devices,DVD
region
codes are really problem for people like me.Beware
FYI --arky
Tuesday, February 1, 2005 Apple restricting DVD region-changes --
voluntarily!
-- UPDATED
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/01/apple_restricting_dv.html
Apple's DVD players are subject to restrictive
rules
laid out by greedy Hollywood studios that don't
really
care if they piss off Apple's customers, since
that's
Apple's lookout. However, I've just discovered, to
my
amazement, that Apple imposes its very own restrictions on its DVD players over and above
those
imposed by the studios: that's right, Apple voluntarily treats its customers worse than the studios say it has to.
In the crazy world of DRM for DVDs, there's this
idea
that a Hollywood studio should be able to tell you where you're allowed to watch a DVD after you buy
it.
They accomplish this with something called "Region Codes." Discs have region-codes and players have region-codes. If you have a Region 1 disc (US and Canada) and a Region 2 player (Europe), and you put the disc in the player, the player will reject it.
But what happens when you take your laptop from New York to London? You're in Region 2, but you bought your device in Region 1. Can you buy a disc in
London
and play it on your computer?
Yes and no. When a computer manufacturer gets a DVD-decoding license from Hollywood's licensing
cartel
(the DVD Copy Control Association or CCA), it is allowed to make players that can change regions up
to
five times.
What's more, once the region-switches have run out, computer companies can reset your counter at a
service
depot a further five times. That means that you get
25
region-switches. This sucks pretty bad: I moved
from
San Francisco to London with hundreds of Region 1
DVDs
and now when I buy a movie in the shop, it's Region
That means that if I watch a movie from my US collection once a week, and once from my UK
connection
the next week, I'll run out of region switches in three months. Three months after moving to the UK, I'll have to throw out half my DVDs.
So, basically, I don't watch my DVDs. Sometimes, though, I'm weak, and I tune into one and squander
one
of my precious region switches. Now my nearly-new Powerbook has only one switch left out of its
initial
five, and so I brought it to Apple to get them to reset the counter. It needed service anyway (I'm on
my
fifth or sixth screen replacement for the defect in the 15" machines that causes the "white blobs" to obscure the display), so it seemed like a good time
to
do it.
I know that Apple is allowed to do this. How do I know? Well, when EFF went to the Copyright Office
and
asked it to give us an exemption to the DMCA to
make
tools for watching out-of-region DVDs, Time-Warner showed up and told us this:
"And, the way it works, and I apologize because it's a little bit complicated, the consumer can set
it
five times. After the fifth time that they've reset it, they do have an ability to reset it again, but they have to bring the drive to an authorized
dealer
or an authorized service representative, who can
then
authorize an additional set of five changes, and
then
they can bring it back for a second, for a third, fourth and fifth set of authorized changes. So you
can
change it 25 times in total, but you have to go
back
for each set of five. You only get the first five
when
you buy the ROM drive itself."
That was Dean Marks, from AOL Time Warner. Straight from the horse's mouth, testifying to the US government.
But when my Powerbook was ready for pickup, Apple
left
me a voicemail saying that they couldn't reset my
DVD
player, that doing so would void my warranty.
When I went into the Apple Store in London to get
the
machine, I asked about it. I wanted this in
writing:
if they had a policy that said that they couldn't
fix
my region-counter, I wanted to be able to tell Dean Marks about it the next time we went to the
Copyright
Office and ask him why Apple thought it couldn't
reset
my counter.
Apple refused to put it into writing. They refused
to
let me record them telling me they couldn't fix my Powerbook. They wouldn't even put in writing that
they
were referring me to the legal department.
Eventually
I spoke to the manager, who promised to get back to
me
the next day.
The next day, he did. He told me that he'd spoken
to
legal and that they wouldn't put anything in
writing.
However, they did have some documents on their
website
they printed for me that talk about DVDs.
- DVD Player: About DVD-Video Regions, last
modified July 16, 2004, technical contributor J
Scalo.
This document describes the different regions,
saying
that after five region-switches, "the drive is permanently set to use that region, and you cannot make any more changes."
Interestingly, this also contains somethinglabeled APPLE EYES ONLY that says that
On Wallstreet and PDQ (PowerBook G3Series
M4753), the number of region code changes remaining
is
not stored in the firmware of the DVD drive but
rather
in the DVD extension and NVRAM. This information should absolutely not be conveyed to the customer.
In extreme customer satisfactionsituations
you can reset the region change count by following this procedure: 1. Reset PRAM/NVRAM by pressing Fn-Ctrl-Shift-Power while the computer is turned
off
2. Startup with system extensions off. 3. Restart with system extensions on. Note: This procedure resets some of thecustomer's custom settings.
After following this procedure, theregion
change count for the drive is reset to five.
In later PowerBook models, the regioncount
is stored in the firmware of the drive and cannot
be
reset with this procedure.
- Changing the region code of your DVD drive,
last
modified on January 23, 2004. This document says
that
you can only change your region code five times. "After that, the region code is set permanently and you cannot change it."
So there's two things going on here that I'm pretty pissed off about:
- The studios have screwed the electronics
companies with this region code business and I have
to
throw out my DVDs or buy an extra Powerbook or something 2. Worse, though: Apple has a policy about region-changing that is more restrictive than it
has
to be: they're playing for the other side. This
really
stinks and makes me wonder why I should keep on
buying
Apple hardware.
Lots of Apple execs read Boing Boing. If you have a reply on this, email me and I'll be happy to
discuss
it with you.
Update: Many of you have written to point out that
VLC
plays out of region DVDs on a Powerbook. That's
nice,
but it doesn't work reliably on my Powerbook.
Update 2: Thanks for all the tips on how to hack my Powerbook or change its firmware. I'm afraid that
I'm
not in the market for this, though, tempting as it
is,
as I've been informed that using these tools will
void
my warranty.
posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:46:39 AM permalink | Other blogs commenting on this post
===== ____________________________________ /\ \ _| Rakesh 'arky' Ambati | | Bangalore (INDIA) | | Homepage: http://arky.port5.com/ | | _______________________________|_ _/_________________________________/
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Sriharsha Vedurmudi
Software Engineer
Redpine Signals Inc.
Gate #395, Plot 87,88
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Banjara Hills,
Hyderabad - 500 034,
Andhra Pradesh,
India.
www.redpinesignals.com
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