Universal versus universality
Jun. 30th, 2004 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
VLC
Date: 2004-06-30 03:53 pm (UTC)Use VLC to view any DVD any time. When you insert a region-locked DVD, I can't remember exactly what happens, but just ignore the warnings etc... then launch VLC.
In the Sytsem Preferences/CDs & DVDs pane you can also set it to automatically launch VLS (or MPlayer if you prefer).
For some insight into DRM, copyright etc, a good read is Cory Doctorow's presentation to Microsoft:
http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
(The tech/legal discussions related to your 13 year old "Pop stars, nein danke" piece are happening now... if you expand it to culture production at large and not just the british music scene of the day, of course... ;)
Prost!
bopuc.