Video Asylum

Posted by Some Guy on July 31, 2003 at 05:38:09

In Reply to: A player that really does everything... illegal... posted by clarkjohnsen on July 30, 2003 at 09:40:42:

One of the things that bothers me most about DVDs and the way they've been issued is the whole Region thing... It bothers me because it seems like being able to store all of the data about a movie digitally would lend itself to being able to translate that digital data on the fly into whichever format would work for whichever country it's in. Instead, however, they choose to break the world into however many regions (not even based upon the broadcast formats of NTSC, PAL, Secam, etc) just to force the differences.

Personally I could see far greater economies of scale in producing one DVD worldwide and then changing the art for each locale. It would be great if the system had been designed around setting some defaults on your player that would then control how the DVD would be accessed (default language, default sound, subtitles on/off automatically...) All of that sounded like it would make sense to me, but apparently I and quite a few others are off our rockers and the current system makes far more sense. Whatever...

Anyway, I have absolutely no urge to make VHS copies from a DVD, so that aspect of Macrovision deactivation doesn't appeal to me. What does appeal to me about it is the fact that Macrovision screws with the picture far too much and causes a loss in quality that I'm not prepared to part with if it's avoidable.

Another problem I've found is that it strongly reduces your flexibility in setting up your system. One thing many people found is that older and cheaper TVs don't have RCA ins for video and audio. Since every DVD player I've seen relies upon these connections to get into your TV, people have tried to plug into their VCRs since most of them have these inputs. The macrovision signal hits the circuitry of the VCR and then these horrible luminance issues come up. Thus this approach doesn't work. People are forced to buy these RF Modulator boxes that take up another input and usually degrade the signal further.

I'm only hoping that they don't screw up the HiDef DVD as much as the current version.