Jox wrote:leigh1975 wrote:That's a no-no for me, it's a region 3 and my Blu Ray is unhackable (like 99.9% of them). I'll wait till June and the UK release (I haven't even watched the online version yet).
I thought Blu-Ray players could read
DVDs from any region? (because it's not the same region split as the BD)
Sorry Jox, the CSS DVD region coding is still enforced on all current BluRay players which have a completely separate DRM system for high-definition content. Under European and US law it is technically illegal to ship region-free players (the law isn't enforced, but big name manufacturers try to stay strictly inside the law). This year we should see no-name BluRay players appear from China and it is likely they will be region free for all types of content.
One way round this stupidity is to buy the DVD from whatever region and rip it on to your hard disk using one of the various ripper programs out there (I use Handbrake -
http://handbrake.fr/). These will strip off the CSS encryption and make a region free image on your drive. You can then play the image on the computer or burn it to a blank disk.
Legal bitAccording to UK law (and possibly under other legislations) making
any copy of a disk is illegal as there is no provision for making personal copies under existing copyright legislation. In the US it is also illegal under the Digital Copyright Millennium Act which makes it illegal to circumvent copy-protection such as region coding. HOWEVER, provided you don't resell copies or make them available on the Internet it'd be hard for any law enforcement organisations to claim you've deprived the publisher of a sale or infringed on their intellectual rights - in fact, with many Big D movies not available in Region 2, you might have ADDED a sale. You never know, perhaps a thank-you for the money from Big D would sway a judge
If anyone is interested in intellectual property rights and why things like DRM are a bad idea, I recommend visiting Cory Doctorow's site and having a read of his free book Content, a collection of short essays on why these restrictions are only making life worse for users - after all, apart from the drugs trade can you think of another industry which assumes all its customers are criminals?
http://craphound.com/content/HTH.
M.