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Very interesting! If you get bored because you know it all already,
skip down to the A-B-C and prepare for a surprise.clark
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DVD Players.
The digital age has brought new aspects to American marketing of
electronic equipment. There are now many types of discs carrying audio and
video data; for example: DVD, VCD, S-VCD, Audio CD, MP3, and JPEG
(including Kodak Picture CD), on both CD-R and CD-RW discs. The big
companies (Sony, et. al) would like the consumer to have to buy a separate
machine for each medium. In addition, they also use "protection" and
"prevention" gimmicks to keep the customer from doing what he wants. This
sounds like a stupid marketing concept, but the American consumer is too
dumb to know the difference. First, each DVD player has a region code,
which means it will play only those DVDs sold in your region (Region 1 =
U.S.A.), Secondly, each DVD player has a built-in device called
Macrovision, which prevents any DVD played on the machine from being
copied. Remember audio cassette tape? We could make copies of our own
home-made recordings, or of commercial ones, and share them with our
friends. Never Again! said the big companies, and they spent many millions
in court gaining the legal right to install these restrictions.I bought a DVD of a Henze opera (Der Prinz von Homburg) from an English
shop on the net, knowing full well that it was Region 2 and PAL (the
European system which is supposedly incompatible with the American video
system). The big companies say: YOU WILL NOT WATCH THAT DVD! Even though
it is not and will never be issued in the USA (A Henze opera? What's a
Henze?). Even though it does not compete with any product on the American
market. Even though preventing me from watching it gains nothing for Sony
or its fellows; not one penny.I now own a DVD player that has the following characteristics:
A. It will play all the types of discs mentioned above.
B. It is region-free; it will play DVDs made anywhere in the world,
including PAL discs.C. It has no MACROVISION feature, so one can make VHS copies of DVDs on a
VCR.D. It's audio/video quality is equal to that of my Sony DVD player (i.e.,
superb).E. Hold on to your hat: it cost me $38.74, and it is widely available at
$50.
How is this possible? The player is a Norcent DP-300. You may say: but I
have never heard of Norcent. They sell plenty of DVD players; the main
reason you have never heard of them is the same as the main reason it is
so inexpensive: Norcent does not advertise. Those added features (zone
coding, macrovision) also raise the price of a Sony DVD player, as does
the cost of all those high-powered lawyers. Norcent is made in China; as
has been the case with clothing and rugs, I find Chinese materials and
workmanship to be of consistently superb quality. If you object to buying
a DVD player not made in America, you are probably out of luck, as I don't
think any DVD players are made in the U.S.A.The moral to this tale may be read in two ways: if you are a businessman,
you may find it (along with Sony's enormous profits) a heart-warming
triumph of capitalism. As a consumer, I see it as a gigantic rip-off.Jim North
Follow Ups:
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.
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