Double Flee A

There has been quite a happening.

There was a disappointing series of events culminating in tonight's heartbreaking arrival of a dvd player that said it was region free, but was in fact, not. I had bought this turkey to play a Russ Meyer dvd I had bought without noticing that it was a PAL (region 2) dvd. After spending eighty bucks to watch this fucker (twenty by getting the dvd from the UK rather than forty direct from Russ Meyer and sixty for the "region free" dvd player) I was a-sulkin'.

DVD and TV formats are broken up into regions for convenience. Region one is NTSC format, which is most of the world. Region 2, PAL, is the UK, Australia, and some other places, but not many. Region 3 is pretty much just France. Region zero, well that's ALL regions.

I had given up hope, and was just punishing myself pricing region free dvd players when I found... at this fine website, a hack to make my previously owned, cheap-ass (no offense, Joyce) dvd player region free.

It said to press 9, 9, 9, 9, 0, on the remote, and then bam, it worked right. If I want a specific region I just enter that region's number after the four nines. A dvd player that is supposed to play only region one dvds can be modified to do all of them by pressing some buttons on the remote. That's hilarious. I couldn't believe it and neither could Joyce. So check this site out and if it works, give him a couple bucks. Then enjoy the sucky-region dvd savings on ebay, the world's biggest mail-order catalog.

So it is a good day, and hopefully I will get my money back for the misadvertised dvd player I got in the mail. It would be ironic if he sent me an email sending me to that website for a hack, wouldn't it?

Cory Doctorow (no relation to E. L.) would say this is a great example of how technology companies break their products (in this case disabling their usefulness to ship more models), then (although I have no evidence of this in this case, it's a safe bet) get mad when they get hacked. He would say that hacking is making something do what it can naturally do. It's not stealing, it's repairing. He's right. But I'm not Cory Doctorow. I just wanted to watch a booby picture, and now I can.

posted by dale @ 11:59 PM