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

[niten.livejournal.com]

Seconding the comments about VLC, but what you definately want to do is stop the DVD Player app from loading whenever you insert a (movie) dvd.

There is a useful app called DVD Info X or something similar which tells you how many software/hardware changes you've got before the drive goes belly up. The site I found this app on used to have a list of drive cracks but I believe the person who's doing them hasn't been doing so for a while.

And yes, a laptop is a portable device, one I'm going to be taking all over the world. Why the hell shouldn't I be able to play DVDs I've legally purchased from wherever I go?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I tried VLC but it wasn't giving me any sound. Then I downloaded MPlayer

http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/

and that seems to work fine. Not a very elegant interface, but it works!

[theophile.livejournal.com]

VLC rules, but it can't override some firmware problems. the sound problem might very well have been a configuration issue-- but then again, VLC has one of the least-elegant interfaces ever.

if you continue to have problems, the internet is full of entirely legal hacks for disabling your drive's region-checking (http://www.regionfreedvd.net/rom.html). the entertainment industry can continue embedding DRM crap in their products as long as they want, for all I care, just so long as it's this easy to get around.

[niten.livejournal.com]

The firmware cracks are great and all, but my suggestion is to use them as a last resort as you could void your warranty. I've checked those sources, and it doesn't look like there's a (mac) crack for any of the recent iBooks (mine included), which is a shame.

I say Mac above, as it's probably entirely possible that there's a crack out there in PC land that might do the job, but that would mean taking the drive out, etc, which'd be a bit of a pain.

In short, momus, it might be better to stick with VLC/mplayer for the time being. Mplayer is a pretty decent download in any case, as it's a free media player that handles a whole hoard of encoding formats.