Eyes Above The Waves

Apple and the "entertainment industry", you really clock my goat.

In the USA we bought a number of DVDs. We moved back to New Zealand and would like to buy some more DVDs, and also borrow some from friends. The region code control on our iMac's DVD drive prevents this; we have to choose to activate it for region 1 (USA and Canada) or region 4 (Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America) and you are only allowed to switch a few times.

What's really annoying is that these artificial constraints on what customers can do with their property don't actually achieve the goal for which they were designed --- to allow DVDs to be released to different markets at different times. In New Zealand (and as far as I know, every other country outside North America) all DVD players you buy in shops have been modified to ignore the region system, and are openly advertised as "multizone". (We don't have a DMCA here so I believe that such modification, done by non-contractually-bound third parties, is legal). If the purpose of the region system was to prevent DVDs released first in the USA making their way to other markets "early", that's evaporated.

Well, there is one class of drives that's not pre-modded: DVD drives in computers. But it's easy to find and download firmware and/or software hacks to get around those. In particular, DVD-playing software such as VLC and the Xine/mplayer stack can actually just crack the region scheme cryptography in real time. That's how I played DVDs in my Linux PC back in New York.

But it turns out that one group has been singled out by Apple and the DVD industry for punishment: owners of late-model Mac hardware. Newer Macs include Matshita drives that are apparently exceptionally difficult to mod, and for which no modded firmware is available. Furthermore these drives forbid access to the raw DVD data if there is a region mismatch, so the VLC and Xine/mplayer approach doesn't work. Foiled!

I could go out and buy a multizone do-everything DVD player from a local mall for 80 NZD (about 50 USD). But then I'd have to buy a TV to plug it into. And then I'd have to buy some furniture to put the TV on. And I'd have to start making and enforcing rules about our children's access to it. That's not appealing, although we may end up going that way.

I could buy an external DVD drive for my Mac and mod its firmware, but I can't find one under 300 NZD.

I could borrow a PC and rip all my DVDs onto blank disks or a portable hard drive, but that's a pain and would potentially lead to copyright violation, something I really want to avoid.

So, Apple and the entertainment industry, consider me one extremely dissatisfied customer. The Mac's been fun but I don't think I'll buy one again.