region encoding = censorship (sorta)

[mr. henry]

i don't want to jump off the deep end, but i think releases like TROMA'S and other independents like the 2600 documentary FREEDOM DOWNTIME are region free..should be supported at every opportunity.

i mean, what if you're visiting a country...you can buy books and take them anywhere and read them anywhere...but movies and shows on regioned DVDs may never be available unless you "illiegaly" get region free players or burned copies. result: movies may never be seen or be available to other cultures...i know the financial reasons companies do this, but it stunts the interflow of cultures...

i so badly want to get copies of FILTHY, RICH, AND CATFLAP and HOTEL PARIDOSO for region 1...i don't want to have to buy used copies on ebay...

F--ck region coding...

mr. henry
www.310am.com

[Mr_Vindictive]

Dude, I'm 100% with you on this one.

I'm a huge fan of asian cinema but I constantly run into problems with region coding.  For example, I recently bought Old Boy on DVD from Ebay.  It turned out to be a bootleg and didn't play the last half hour correctly.

Reason why I had to buy a bootleg - NO REGION 1 DVD!

It seriously p**ses me off with these restrictions.

And I'm surely not gonna spend extra cash on a region free player.

[JohnL]

>but movies and shows on regioned DVDs may never be available unless
>you "illiegaly" get region free players

From what I've read, region free DVD players aren't illegal. This site sells them;

ZoneFreeDVD

Of course the movie industry is hard at work to make sure that there's a way to defeat region free players. They now have system being used in the US that makes a DVD fail to play if you use a region free player. According to the FAQ above, their players can also be set to a specific region in order to defeat this.

Then there's a piece of software for Windows called DVD Region Free which claims that it will allow you to watch any region on any DVD drive, even if it's locked to a specific region. It also claims to let you skip the FBI warnings, defeat Macrovision, decrypt CSS and more.

[blkryder]

I agree it's an annoyance, but I don't think it's that difficult or expensive to circumvent.  Having no region encoding would hurt foreign film sales for American films--how big a bite it would take I don't really know, but since a lot of decent films that flop here often make back their money in foreign countries [for example, just about all of David Lynch's films have wound up making money, but only because his films do better outside the US than within it]  I'd hate to see anything mess that up and make it even less likely for American filmmakers to take chances on something that might be a little too adventurous for US audiences.  

Bottom line is, a person who is serious enough about their movie habit can see the films if they really want to, and it's not even all that tough--at the very least they can make do with VHS bootlegs, which is what I've done in the past.  There are enough reliable grey-market dealers who specialize in stuff that isn't commercially available to keep people from having to buy dodgy bootlegs on E-Bay.   I dealt with one guy for years who made it a habit of removing titles as soon as they became commercially available in the US, and who specialized in providing titles that weren't available on Region 1 or PAL titles.

Besides, in these days where just about every cult film ever made can be easily found I like the idea that there are still a few things out there that you have to work to get.

[dean]

Is it really that hard to find a region free dvd player?  Our family has three, and then two dvd rom, and one ps2.  For a family of five, that's plenty, one would think.

This same problem really annoyed me with VHS as well.   Since here we are PAL, and many other places are NTSC, it was always annoying, until we got an NTSC/PAL vcr.

Region DVDs are very annoying, but I'm sure there's a valid reason for it.  And since most dvd players I know are pretty much multi-zone automatically, it shouldn't be a problem for anyone anymore.  Or so I hope.

[Mr_Vindictive]

You are all correct, Region Free DVD players are fairly easy to find.

I'm just not gonna spend the money to buy a new DVD player.

[R. Hopkins]

Get a DVD player made in HK.  I bet they beat people in the streets with hoses if they have a region coded DVD player there.

[blkryder]

I don' t have a region free player but enough people have them for me to think it probably isn't all that expensive.

[JohnL]

>Having no region encoding would hurt foreign film sales for American films--how
>big a bite it would take I don't really know, but since a lot of decent films that flop
>here often make back their money in foreign countries [for example, just about
>all of David Lynch's films have wound up making money, but only because his
>films do better outside the US than within it] I'd hate to see anything mess that up
>and make it even less likely for American filmmakers to take chances on
>something that might be a little too adventurous for US audiences.

Two points;

1. Nobody goes out of their way to get DVDs from other regions unless what they want either isn't available in their own region, or a foreign copy has more extras. In either case, the customer wants something that isn't available in their region.

2. A DVD sold to a customer in another country still counts as a sale.

So basically the only thing region coding prevents is people playing DVDs that they can't get for their region in the first place, and then the studio loses out on a sale.

And why do studios do this? So they can sit on their asses and dole out the DVDs to selected regions as they see fit.

[blkrider]

It's not about DVD sales, it's about movie tickets.  The reason for encoding is because in a lot of cases movies aren't released at the same time all over the world, and it's not uncommon for a movie to already be on video in the States by the time it's released theatrically in other countries.  Hence, they have region coding so people can't get  DVDs of movies until they are officially released on video in their region.  It ensures that the movies get the same cycle that they do here...theatrical release, then a video release a few months later.   With a lot of movies, I think ticket sales would drop way down overseas if people had the choice to see it on video while it was playing in the theater.

[JohnL]

>It's not about DVD sales, it's about movie tickets. The reason for encoding is
>because in a lot of cases movies aren't released at the same time all over the
>world, and it's not uncommon for a movie to already be on video in the States by
>the time it's released theatrically in other countries. Hence, they have region
>coding so people can't get DVDs of movies until they are officially released on
>video in their region. It ensures that the movies get the same cycle that they do
>here...theatrical release, then a video release a few months later. With a lot of
>movies, I think ticket sales would drop way down overseas if people had the
>choice to see it on video while it was playing in the theater.

Ok, here's an idea; Release the movie to theaters in various countries at the same time! Then people buying the DVD rather than seeing it in the theater wouldn't be an issue.

If it was simply a matter of timing, it wouldn't be that important, but there are a lot of movies and shows that never make it to some regions.

[blkrider]

Probably too expensive for the studios to do that...there are a lot of films that don't even get released everywhere in the US, much less overseas.    

Another thing that has to be taken into account...a lot of people rent movies instead of buying them, and the studio makes little, if anything, when people only rent.  They don't get to charge per person the way they do in the theaters.

It seems like most things eventually make it to region 1--I can rent a lot of Asian DVDs at the video store that were only region three a couple of years ago.  For those that can't wait--all region isn't that expensive, judging from the number of people on the various message boards I visit who seem to have them.  There's also the NTSC/PAL issue to contend with.  If it were a case of all-region players being illegal I could see people getting upset but I suggest if people are big enough movie fans to need to see DVDs from other regions that they should just get an all-region player, or look into the various grey-market dubbing services out there.

[Yaddo42]

"28 Days Later" played overseas for a long time before it was released in the US. But non-Region 1 DVDs and bootlegs were being sold over the Internet during the lag, I saw it on sites that exploit the loophole about works not copyrighted in the US being treated as public domain. Sites like this often have the disclaimer that they will remove an item for sale if a US release happens, like someone mentioned earlier. On the other hand there's a site I check out that was offering the Japanese DVD of "Kill Bill Vol. 1", with the selling point that the Japanese release didn't have that annoying red tint during the "House of Blue Leaves" fight.

Much of the controversy and interest in what edit of "Hero" would be released in the US happened because Miramax sat on the film for so long and because diehard fans bought DVDs from overseas.

So the staggered release works both ways not just for US releases in foreign countries. But I have an interest in seeing films that might never get a legit release here, rather than hoping Miramax or whoever will buy the rights to something I want and trust them not to screw it up. Maybe the disgust of fans who saw the better original version from overseas discs is the reason Miramax put both versions of "Shaolin Soccer" on the DVD for here. I watched the original and scanned parts of the US version to compare. The change in music and graphics was bad enough, but the cutting of scenes seemed just stupid. The pace of the original is not slow or uneven, if American audiences don't like comedies that run much more than 90 minuteswhich seemed to be the thinking, then there's something wrong with us.

I have a DVD player that can be converted to region free or all region, but I haven't had it done. For years I've wanted to see the full version of "Duck, You Sucker!", about 165 minutes roughly, on DVD rather than the US VHS version which is about 128 minutes. I've considered ordering the UK or German release which supposedly contain the full version, since whoever owns the US rights has dragged their feet about it. I read the full version got shown in NYC as part of a film festival this year so maybe that means a restored version on Region 1 DVD is coming.

[JohnL]

>Probably too expensive for the studios to do that...there are a lot of films that
>don't even get released everywhere in the US, much less overseas.

Even more reason why region coding is a bad idea. If a film doesn't get released in other countries and doesn't end up being released on DVD, the average consumer is prevented from seeing it. (by average, I mean non-tech-savvy people who just buy whatever DVD player is on sale at Wal-Mart or the foreign equivalent)