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

[kalephunk.livejournal.com]

If a standalone DVD player is desired, I highly recommend the early Apex series (AD-1100w, specifically). It's a cheaply-made player that was sold at Walmart for $48 about 2-3 years ago, and are easily and cheaply found secondhand (also, the rebranded Norcents that Walmart currently sells are also good). What makes these players so great, besides the cost, is that they're verily easily hacked -- burn a rom image to a CD, insert, DVD player hacked. The hacking benefits are many, including region-unlocking (all regions) as well as custom logos and other aesthetic bits. The DVD player supports a number of formats, including VCD, SVCD, MPEGISO (direct playing of unauthored DVDs or CDs containing MPEG2 files), as well as basic mp3 and CD playing. The MPEGISO and multi-region are my main reasons for recommending it -- being able to fit two DVD rips onto a single DVD, 10 half-hour TV shows on a single DVD, and watching a region 1 film followed immediately by a region 2 all demand that I give this DVD player two thumbs up.

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