Universal versus universality

[imomus]

I took delivery of a new Apple iBook 14" on Monday. The baby weighs 5.9 pounds and is quick, bright and healthy, an oblong white chunk of happiness. (Read Man of broken letters for an account of everything that had gone wrong with my old iBook.)

I have only two complaints. Apple changed the Airport architecture, so I can't use my old Airport card in the new machine. And the DVD drive only allows you to switch regions five times in the entire life of the computer. Since I have DVDs from all regions, this means that I'm going to have to decide which to watch and which to turn into paperweights. As far as I can see there is no hack for my DVD drive, the Matshita CD-RW CW-8123.

When DVD was invented, the Hollywood studios devised the region system so that their product roll-outs could continue to be staggered, allowing them to concentrate marketing resources in different countries at different times. Now, I watch very few Hollywood films. I've bought DVDs all over the world, in full legality, and I've bought a player to play them on, at full cost. And yet my DVDs, from Japan, Russia, Europe and America, cannot all be played. Hollywood, not content merely to restrict the view of the world in its own products -- products which I can, and do, choose to avoid -- has restricted the view I can get of the world from all DVDs. Instead of encoding its own products to restrict them, it has encoded the player, which should be universal.

Comments

Universal appeal

[martymartini.livejournal.com]

I bought the same model a few months ago, and I must agree with you, what a shame the DVD drive is not multi-region. Speaking of Hollywood studios twiching and altering things in order to restrict the view of the world with their marketing ploys,
I saw a teaser for Zatoichi, the most recent Kitano movie, and the distribution rights for America are owned by Miramax, and they definitely made it look like some Hollywood movie, with the cheesy voice over and all.Miramax's famous for toying and editing foreign movies in order to make them more "universally appealing"... In my opinion, those changes just take away the whole appeal a foreign film might have, which is due in part to its unformated exotism.