I used to have this DvD player that a friend referred to as “slutty” because it would play anything.  Because of this, I’d forgotten about Region Encoding on DvDs.  My collection includes US, UK, French and Italian DvDs, none of them stolen, all paid for.  My slutty DvD player died (of some kind of electronic syphillis?) and we are currently borrowing our lodger’s similar bargain-bin player.  It had a menu where you could choose the region, and so I set it to 0 and it became as promiscuous as the last one.

However this DvD player has no remote (at least not in any known location) so it’s not possible to select subtitles on my foreign titles.  Dubbing’s fun for many Hong Kong movies but usually is crap at conveying the pathos in anything more civilized.  Surprisingly, Kung Fu Hustle is a movie that is better subtitled than dubbed.  But how to turn on the subtitles?

I decided to turn my Mac Mini into a media centre - with a slightly expensive USB peripheral it can become a set-top box, a TiVo and a DvD player all in one.  As phase one, I simply moved it to near the telly and put Kung Fu Hustle into the drive.

Which isn’t region free.

And probably never will be.

So my £(hundreds) mac mini media centre can only play half my DvDs, whereas the £20 DvD player from a bargain bin in Glasgow can play all of them?!

I’m currently faced with a choice of replacing the drive in the Mini with a much older one, that has weaker protection that can be overcome, or hoping that someone comes up with a dodgy hack to replace the drive’s firmware.

There can be no moral defence of Region protection:

• It cannot stop commercial piracy — if you can play it anywhere, you can copy it.  In fact, I would pay £3 more for a DvD that was region-free and did not have a tedious anti-piracy message on the front that you cannot skip over.  There might be a lucrative market for someone in Shanghai or Bangkok there.
• Its only effective purpose is to allow distributors to charge more for the same product in one country than in another.
• Its main effect is to rob innocent consumers of the ability to watch movies not released in their country or to take their DvD collection with them when they emigrate.
• Its secondary effect is to make otherwise-straight techie geeks like myself do a lot of research into legally very shady areas in order to watch Kung Fu Hustle on the same player as Salsa: Latin Pop Music in the Cities and Les Vacances de M. Hulot.