Off topic rant. - I just want to watch the fricken movie!

 Ok, a rant about the movie industry. I know this is way off topic, but I had to vent. There is this movie I have been looking for called “Chasing the deer”. It is a British film made in 1994 about the second Jacobite rebellion of 1746. It’s not a terribly well made movie, but historically it is very good. The problem, it was never released to the US market and when it was released it was in a very limited number. So I had my contacts on the hunt for it. About a month ago I found a copy. It was a German release of the film but it had the option for English audio so I consider it a score! The jacket and DVD menu is all in German though, but I don’t really care. Even better was the price, $7! Anyway, it was shipped from overseas and landed on my doorstep yesterday.

Now the gripe. First I throw it in my Playstation(my DVD player broke last week) and get a nice message telling me it can’t play it because of regional restrictions. Damn, that sucks. So I pop it out and throw it in my wife’s eMac. Hey, what do ya know! A screen telling me that I need to change the regional code on the DVD drive in order to watch the movie. I will be “allowed” to do this 4 more times before it locks the drive in the last viewed region. What a load of crap. If you answer “cancel” it spits the DVD back out, have a nice day. So, third try is the charm. I grab my Powerbook and pop it in. I have the autolaunch of the DVD player turned off so it doesn’t fire up the Apple DVD player as soon as the disk mounts. Just as an FYI, when I did launch the player I got the same nice message but for some reason I only have 3 chances to switch the region left. In the end I end up using an opensource media player(VLC) to play the DVD. It just ignores the region code and luckily doesn’t set the counter on the DVD drive. Now there is about a million other ways to watch this film. I could use MactheRipper to rip a image and strip the regional encoding off, I could use RegionX to reset the firmware on the drive every time I use it, I could buy a “all region” DVD player off of the Internet for $100(which I may still do, I need a new one anyway).

But my question is why? Why do they do this to us. It’s not like you can’t work around it. If I was a pirate I could just bit torrent movies I wanted. What is the deal with region encoding, can anyone tell me? What I was told is region encoding is so movie companies can charge us wealthy Americans and other well to do countries more for the movies than poorer countries. They are afraid if they release Cars2 here for $29.95 and it’s only $9 in China that we’ll all just order it from China. That’s just fine but what about movies that are never released in the US? We just get the high hard one. What disturbs me more is the power the movie industry seems to have over our OS vendors and hardware makers. To support this region encoding the DVD drive has to support it as does the player app. That bugs me more than anything. My hard earned money bought the player and the DVD yet in order to use them together I need to use a “free” piece of software which some may argue is illegal. Enough is enough. Oh yeah, I watched “Chasing the deer” last night and throughly enjoyed it so the movie industry can bite me.

End of rant.