Originally posted by Socrates
Originally posted by fishbowl
Yep! As well as, make it region free/Macrovision free.
Can you explain this. I am clueless on video standards.
DVDs are marked with a REGION which allows the studios to control which countries can play which DVDs when. For instance, if a movie came out in theaters in the US on May 1st, and in Amsterdam on August 15th and there were no regions, why would anyone go to the theater when they can wait a few more weeks for the video/DVD release?
Also, the major studios here usually do not handle distribution in other countries. Another company in these other countries negotiate the video and DVD distribution rights to the film based on the number of copies of the localised DVD they will sell there. They foot the bill on NTSC->PAL conversion, etc. Because of budgets, etc. many non-USA DVDs are quite stripped down and missing supplemental features.
Also there are some in Europe who are very unhappy with the 4% speed-up process applied to all movies to make them work with the PAL 25fps/50 Hz system.
So if the Aquarium were region-coded to Region 1, then it would only play in unmodified DVD players sold in the USA, Canada, and Mexico. If you brought the DVD to Australia, it would put up a message that this disc won't play. Australia and the UK share the Region 4 code.
I can see why they did this, but it doesn't really stop people from just modifying their DVD players. Many Japanese films end up on VERY poor/edited/censored/re-dubbed DVDs over here (shockingly, Disney owns the rights to many Hong Kong films like much of the Jackie Chan library and they are butchering the films before DVD release
). So people get a region-free DVD player and then just buy the out-of-region discs normally.
I know Canadians who buy the American versions of DVDs just to avoid having the unnecessary bi-lingual printing all over the DVDs (every product sold in Canada MUST have French and English) in sloppy yellow writing.
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As for Macrovision, it is an encoding in the picture which prevents the DVD from being copied to a VCR without a macrovision removal device.
Macrovision also slightly degrades (some say imperceptably) the picture quality.