Not everything is happy-happy in OS X land.
Last night I was digging through my DVDs trying to figure out what I owned and what I just thought I owned and I found my Region 2 (Europe) Farscape DVDs. This is particularly relevant at the moment 'cause the SciFi channel is bringing back Farscape for a 4-hour mini-series shortly and I've been catching up on Season 4 episodes (which I missed living in France).
I have a Raite AVPhile 715 DVD player which is region-free and Macrovision-free (just so I can back up my DVDs you understand) that I normally use. (Go to this site for a list of modifiable DVD players.) However, last night I popped the Farscape 1 DVD into my Titanium Powerbook to see what would happen with the region encoding. Parenthetically, region encoding is something the movie industry came up with (I believe that there are six regions, 1 being US/Canada, 2 is Europe, 3 is Asia, etc.) to ensure that movies could be released in separate geographical regions on different dates and not viewable elsewhere. If your player "supports" region encoding you only have a limited number of times (like 5) before it will no longer play disks of all regions (at least on a computer) before fixing on just supporting one region. Total cr*p.
Anyway, the OS X DVD player supports region encoding and warned me that I only have five viewings of DVDs from different regions before I must choose which one to have permanently.
So I killed it and fired up VLC which has no such limitation. And which actually plays a much wider variety of formats. (NB: if you want to view DVDs with Videolan you may need to install the open-source decryption algorithms of libdvdcss. It's been a while since I did it and I think you need to install Fink first.)
Thank God for open source is all I can say.
Posted by artandscience at August 31, 2004 09:27 AM