[smax013]

dougoftheabaci said:

@smax013:
As you yourself stated all of this also falls under the category of Fair Use. As such, since it's a grey area, it can be argued to be illegal and legal at the same time. Thus, until a ruling body decides one way or another it is theoretically not an illegal act. Just because one law states it is and another says it isn't, the one saying it isn't in that situation since it's more specific to the uses of the individual for personal enjoyment of legally purchased merchandise takes precedence.

To some degree I agree and to some degree I disagree. I agree that it is unknown if it is really legal or not because as I noted, it has not been tested in court. But, you cannot just say that because there is a conflict, it is deemed legal. That is an issue for a court to decide. Thus, the reality is that IF you rip a DVD, you might be committing an illegal act as deemed by the DMCA...and until legal precidence is set for such a situation, you tushie is exposed to legal action, which you could lose. The other way to look at it is that there is law on the books that makes that act illegal. Until that law is ruled unconstititional or improper or however else you want to phrase it, it is a legally binding law. Thus, if you rip a DVD and "get caught" doing it, then you can be taken to court and you could be found "guilty".



Having said that, I believe there are lot of people who believe that it is unenforceable due to Fair Use rights. Thus, in the end, it becomes a personal decision as to how much risk believe is there and whether you personally want to take that risk. There is still a reasonable chance that it could be deemed by courts to be enforceable, so ripping DVDs does care the potential for some legal risk even if only used under Fair Use for personal use. In other words, ripper beware.

[smax013]

Chris Breen said:

Before this thread devolves into a legal argument between non-lawyers, let me offer that I've spoken to Intellectual Property lawyers about this subject and subjects like it and even they're iffy on a lot of this stuff for exactly the reason that Fair Use and the DMCA are at odds. License agreements can say what they like — they're not legally binding. Until these issues are tested in court, there's no real knowing what is and isn't kosher.

Exactly. The only legal opinion that is ultimately binding is the court's. In theory, it should help to get a legal opinion from a lawyer who is well versed in the law in that particular area and knows the precident, but ultimately, that opinion is just the opinion of an individual who might be wrong, even if they are more educted and knowledgeable in legal matters. And it becomes even more difficult if there is not a lot of legal precident on point dealing with the specifics (as I believe to be the case with Fair Use vs. DMCA). About the only precident out there might if there is general precident on what is done when you have an existing law on the books with a lot of "history" that is conflict with a new law that did not specifically address the old law (i.e. repeal or modify parts of the old law).



To some degree, I would guess that the movie folks may not want to test it as they realize that they might lose and thus set precident that they don't like/want. In other words, they probably like the "iffiness" that exists if they believe that they would lose.

[rickcarl]

CB, IANAL so I won't address the legal opinions but I was addressing the title of your article about wrestling with DVD region coding. Buy a DVD. Buy a DVD player. Play the two together anywhere in the world. No grey. No ambiquity. No iffy. No restraints. No license issues. I consider that a valid, clear cut approach that is kosher. It does not have any legal entanglements.
Message was edited by: rickcarl

[FreeNonsense]

As with all legal arguments, there are at least two sides - in this case there is a third one: Besides the "work around is legal" and "work around is illegal" there is also the consideration whether region codes are legal at all. The wikipedia page on "Regional_lockout" lists the following points for region codes being illegal:

* It allows price-discrimination, which may be illegal in some countries.
* It presents a barrier to free trade, which may be illegal in some areas such as the European Union. Since the accession of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia there are two regions in the European Union, restricting trade in the bloc. This state of affairs has yet to be challenged in court.
* Allows market control which may violate anti trust laws in some countries.

If one examines how owners of monopolies typically license their intellectual property in order to avoid getting into trouble, one encounters RAND - reasonable and non discriminatory. They do this not because they like it, but because this is the way they get away with under anti-trust law. It is really quite astonishing that the entertainment industry got away with this blatantly discriminating behavior until now.

[smax013]

FreeNonsense said:

As with all legal arguments, there are at least two sides - in this case there is a third one: Besides the "work around is legal" and "work around is illegal" there is also the consideration whether region codes are legal at all. The wikipedia page on "Regional_lockout" lists the following points for region codes being illegal:

I don't consider that a third side...rather is the arguement itself. If there are two sides, one saying it is illegal and the other saying it is legal, then by default we don't know whether something is legal or not unless it has been ruled upon by a court. Another way to look at it, if the region codes are deemed illegal, then any "work around" would be legal in general they are allowing people to deal with an illegal item. There could still be some "work arounds" that are illegal because you have to do some thing illegal to get your legal functionality. Gets kind of murky and confusing.



The ultimate point is that debating whether or not region codes are illegal or not is kind of moot as your or my opinion don't really matter...the only one that matters is a court of law. Unless I am a judge ruling on a case, me believing region codes are illegal doesn't mean spit.



Oh, and I suspect that there is a strong possibility that there are some scenarios where region codes could in fact be found to be illegal if they ever were challenged in court. But, that is also a likely reason why you don't see the DVD/movie industry trying to get cease & desist orders against manufacturers of region free DVD players...they lilkely don't want it challenged in court with precident set that might not be what they want. There are lots of laws that might ultimately be deemed illegal/unconsitutionaly/invalid if they were ever challenged...but until they are, they are deemed legal and in full force.

[rspress]

I use Velan's "Fast DVD Copy" which rips out region codes and copy protection and is much easier to use than Mac The Ripper-Toast and is much faster too. It is pricey but you can get a discount by reading it's page on versiontracker.com. It sure made converting a bunch of Japanese DVD's a click one button process.

[Bill501]

Of course the best option is to get 2 or 3 Macs, for regions 1, 2 and 4.
Or put 2 DVD drives in a Mac Pro.
My solution has been to rip and burn and I rarely have a problem, except that some discs require gettind rid of the menuing system. This is not really a viable solution for a large DVD collection.
Toast 9 is very helpful as one can burn and entire VIDEO_TS folder and VOB files.

[digidan]

While I understand that this is a mac-related thread, if all you're wanting to do is watch region 2 discs, couldn't you just purchase a cheap DVD-playing game console? Heck, at least in Texas, a used "fat" PS2 sells for only $80. Of course, this probably isn't the best option depending on what you're trying to do, such as watching on the go or ripping DVDs, but it should at least let you play such DVDs. Of course, some Firewire DVD players are also in the same ballpark, so again, this may not be the best solution.
For that matter, are any game console DVD drives region free, or are they standard region-based DVDs? Hmm.... I recall hearing something about needing to use a mod-chip (in the US) to play imported games, so that may be a problem.... Wait, doesn't Japan use NTSC? confused

[dougoftheabaci]

digidan said:

While I understand that this is a mac-related thread, if all you're wanting to do is watch region 2 discs, couldn't you just purchase a cheap DVD-playing game console? Heck, at least in Texas, a used "fat" PS2 sells for only $80. Of course, this probably isn't the best option depending on what you're trying to do, such as watching on the go or ripping DVDs, but it should at least let you play such DVDs. Of course, some Firewire DVD players are also in the same ballpark, so again, this may not be the best solution.

For that matter, are any game console DVD drives region free, or are they standard region-based DVDs? Hmm.... I recall hearing something about needing to use a mod-chip (in the US) to play imported games, so that may be a problem.... Wait, doesn't Japan use NTSC? confused

Game consoles have regions, just like most DVD players. I say most because you can get DVD players play both NTSC and PAL as well as any region. My ex had one she bought in the UK for about #30 ($60). If you're looking to watch movies on a TV that is the best option. However it doesn't really help us computer users unless we use an EyeTV.

[LisaJo]

Thank you, x5josh5x, for your clear explanation of the role the DVD Player software plays in region code settings, the existence of Region X 1.1.3, and how to set it all up. After doing a bunch of reading about the DVD region coding mess, I finally decided to just buy an external DVD drive to play my region 2 DVDs, and play my region 1 DVDs on my mac. I would have had no idea how to make it all work without your help. It works perfectly!

[pacmanz]

I am from a little country called New Zealand. Here we multi-region on all players and in the shops. Consequently any night I hire a video it could be a different region. Really really frustrating. I have used VLC but it is inconsistent. Not keen to rip hire videos... Can I play feed a video player output directly into my Mac and view it real time?

[jamesbond007]

I believe this is one area where using Windows is better than using Mac.

All DVD drives used on computers, whether Windows or Mac, are encoded with region code encoding in their firmware and only allow for changing the region code up to a maximum of 5 times. And the Matshita drives used by older Apple Macs (my 2006 Mac mini apparently uses one) were not able to be converted to "region free" status, causing great difficulties as stated in the article.

In contrast, most DVD drives sold on use with Windows computers, such as those from Liteon, is pretty easy to convert to Region Free (RPC1) status, if you know where to look. In the case of Liteon drives it does not even require messing with the firmware of the drive.

And on the software side, there are numerous programs on Windows that allows you to bypass the region encoding on movie DVDs that can be used for different purposes. For example, DVDFab allows you to rip the DVD to the hard disk, removing any copy protection in the process. The resulting copy can be burnt to DVD, or played with DVD playing software such as PowerDVD as if it were a real DVD. It can also be used with Handbrake (Mac or Windows version) to convert the video to MP4 for use on computers and iPods. I personally use DVDFab (the free version or the free part) to rip the DVDs to hard disk and then use Handbrake on Windows to convert the video to MP4 for my own future viewing. (The reason why I do it on Windows is because my PC contains an Intel Quad Core Q9550 CPU which is much faster than my little Mac mini (only an Intel Core 2 Duo) with Handbrake.)

If you just want to play the DVDs without ripping them to the hard disk, you can use a software called AnyDVD together with a DVD playing software such as PowerDVD.

And by the way, the latest version of PowerDVD, version 9, now contains a new technology which allows for "upscaling" of the DVD video to near-HD resolution. Supported video files such as H.264 MP4 can also be "upscaled".

All this lead me to conclude that at least in case of DVD region coding using Windows is better than Mac as there are numerous tools available. And if you want the MP4 files converted by Handbrake on Windows can be transferred to a Mac and played there too.

As a final disclaimer, I do not work for the companies producing DVDFab, AnyDVD, or PowerDVD other than being a satisfied user.

[rab777hp]

This is also where you have the advantage of mac clones.