Kim Plowright wrote: >> Here in the US, that is not the case. It is much harder to find such DVD >> players. > > Because they contravene the DMCA act? IANAL, and certainly not across > american law, but I thought it expressly forbade the circumventing of > content locks?
Playing a region 2 disk in North America doesn't involve breaking any content locks -- it's no different from having a region 2 player in the same box as your region 1 player. I think it would involve some high-value comedy lawyering to make a case that this is a DMCA violation, unless mere possession of a lawfully-acquired region 2 player outside of region 2 is somehow a crime. I believe the reason that multi-region DVD players are hard to find in the States is simply because multi-standard televisions are uncommon there. UK region 2 DVDs are almost all encoded in PAL video format, so to watch them you need a TV than can cope with lovely PAL video, rather than horrible old NTSC. Since TVs that can display PAL seem to be about as common in the States as hen's teeth, multi-region DVD players aren't much use there. (I have a friend in the States who had to spend an unholy amount of money a year or two ago to acquire the ability to play non-NTSC DVDs. His choice was either to *import* a PAL-compatible TV or buy a fancy-schmancy DVD player that did on-the-fly PAL->NTSC transcoding, a non-trivial operation. This was completely separate from the issue of region coding.) More info on DVD video coding, and how it differs from region coding, here: http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#1.19 -- Frank Wales [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
