Blu-ray region-lock blues...and fixes 

Also, who knows what they'll do with a firmware update these days...Good to have options!

+1 !

And if the viewer has either if the same DD players, this shows them multi-region is possible.

Techmoan is better than 99% of what's on TV!

Absolutely

So true!!

You never really own them.

My thoughts too. :)

@@zwz.zdenek ?

I just use my region free player.

😆

... Just to make sure I got it right the first time lol 👻

haha dont he realize that this is usefull for me not everyone has the same blu-ray player as him

You’re acting though being a paying customer & being a pirate is mutually exclusive. We’re not all assholes. I pirate movies first with PirateBay or streaming sites so I can watch it first, then if I like it I buy the physical copy to add to my collection Also I use PirateBay with no VPN. It’s apparently risky but overall the pirating process isn’t very difficult. Just do it yourself rather than bitching :/

EXCELLENT point!

yes i have tried both and piracy is easier just go to your favourite torrent site search for what you want and click download then wait and then watch

Sony is such greedy SOB. Why make your good paying customers jump through hoops? This is the death of the format. I have so many BluRay disc, all playing nicely on my BluRay drive of my computers, until an update. Now I got to pay for new software players to view my discs. You are kidding me Sony? Software BluRay players should be free like software DVD players. I have not purchase a BluRay disc since. A big middle finger to you Sony.

you've learned a hard lesson; don't do updates.

region locking is on youtube already

It's just market protection. Noone will buy blurays in hk for a price of UK market

I doubt there will be any upcoming physical formats beyond bluray

Streaming has region locking too though. For example, the "Dutch" Netflix has a fraction of the content of what you have in the US. It's just easier to hide I suppose

Mike Van Pelt Yeah, so I've heard, though USA's Netflix isn't so great anymore. I think everyone has a story about something they enjoyed being taken down at some point. The whole concept behind licenses only working in certain countries just seems so obsolete now. We have this amazing worldwide communications network, but I (USA) can't stream certain shows from Channel 4 because... some higher-up wouldn't be able to make free money off of licensing fees? Nutty, but that's one of the growing pains of the internet.

ABSOLUTELY agree! Many releases, which are only on region A at first, may *eventually* come out on region B, so what is the point of making the rest of us WAIT? Some will simply forget about the film and not buy it at all. Some MAY choose to see it at the cinema, and then decide to not bother buying it at all either. (By then it is past its prime.) Worse, many older titles come out on region A only, which means that the rest of the world can NEVER buy them; in other words, this is LIMITING sales, instead of making these titles available worldwide; they are artificially restricting them to to the USA and those few who are willing and able to make a hardware mod to their player. Crazy!

I’m glad Nintendo got rid of it on Switch.

I hate region coding myself but from a business point of view i can understand why it was set up in the first place. When a movie is released in theatre at the same time in US and Europe, it's available most of the time first on DVD/Blu-Ray in US because american laws allow shorter delay between theatre release and domestic release (3 monthes in the US while it used to be 6 monthes of wait in Europe, recently reduced to 4 monthes). Having that in mind it's easy to guess that the movie industry decided to region code the medias in order to prevent easy reading from an american disc in Europe at the same time movie could still be available in theatre, hence reducing the amount of cinema viewers and potential benefits from commercial exploitation. Of course all this proved to be useless as the so-called regional AACS protection was quickly cracked and illegal copies fom movies made their way to various download or streaming websites, turning the whole region-protection thing into a nuisance and lack of ergonomy for users rather than a real mean to protect the movie industry from rogue exploitations.

That's why I download a lot of films. It takes months for them to get released in Australia (if at all), and when they are, they are much more expensive than overseas. A lot of films get released on Blu-ray in the US before they even get released in theatres in Australia (John Wick & Planet Terror in particular pissed me off - now I refuse to buy them no matter how cheap). Instead of waiting for the official release and get charged up the ass, I'll just get a Blu-ray rip from the internet a few months earlier. It's funny how people who earn no money from uploading these films do a better job of distributing them than the film distributors themselves. They deserve to go out of business.

It's pure 100% stupid, copyright holders cutting off their noses to spite their faces, they likely lose more from lost sales due to region restrictions than they gain from people buying from the correct region.

Are DVDs cheaper in china?

just like pollution or tax companies can practically ignore it - _but_ if you or I want to drive faster than 75Kph, plastic straws, or two darn pennies to rub together _we_ can basically _forget it._

I have one SACD which was ridiculously expensive in Germany, so I bought it cheaply from a US shop which had imported it from Australia. The first thing I noticed when ripped open the envelope was that the disc was labeled... "Made in Germany".

@@klausstock8020 Very ironic

it's not even a matter of cheaper discs. A huge amount of titles are only available to certain regions. Not to mention special releases.

Philip Leitch Well, there’s a thing I didn’t know. Doesn’t it take forever to get things from there?

The Australian 3DS is region locked

Good guys aussies

They use full-fat electricity too, bonus!

MrVolksbeetle no, but that might be because I live in Australia

And physical formats endure through time, so that future generations will be able to watch those then old movies, unlike the ones gone because they are not popular anymore and streaming companies make room for new content. As for "watch this", there is often a "watch this" on optical media, as there are trailers of movies you might not be interested in, or in case of some TV series season x disc 1 a long and annoying intro, as well as "piracy kills wildlife" and "piracy is bad for your eyes" warnings. Only some players let you skip that, but when watching on PC, no problemo. I like to go to countryside for holidays, and there is no internet, not even over GSM, so I like to bring a laptop and some DVDs to watch in the evening, or a hard drive full of backups of those DVDs (which I own and don't give away or sell to people later on), as I believe in backing up everything in case it goes bad, plus they are more portable that way.

I completely agree, John. However, you only ever "own" the physical disc, but NEVER the content contained thereon. You are only allowed to play it according to the licence.

Well you can pirate stuff with bonus content too

And for when I go to a special cabin in the middle of nowhere, and by that I mean it takes time to get there and no cellular or internet service whatsoever...it's nice to grab a disc and shove it into a player and get movies....streaming doesn't work everywhere.

Other advantages are: I don't want to sit in front of a PC in a relatively uncomfortable chair to watch a 2 h movie. I can also watch the DVD at any time, even 50 y into the future (unless they don't sell DVD players anymore but we can also use a PC to convert it and write it to another CD like media.).

Fine detail and high-risk (In terms of possibly breaking the player) soldering at that! :-)

@@renakunisaki There was nothing wrong with the player.

What do you mean a waste of his time? He never said it was a waste of his time and everything worked perfectly.

I agree

It's not a waste if your time if you enjoy it, no matter what it is!

@Orlando Mordechai instablaster :)

@Frederick Billy thanks for your reply. I found the site thru google and I'm trying it out now. I see it takes quite some time so I will reply here later when my account password hopefully is recovered.

@Frederick Billy It worked and I actually got access to my account again. Im so happy! Thanks so much you saved my account!

@Orlando Mordechai Happy to help :D

I second this. I mean, it's been done to death back in the day, but it has been a while since anyone talked about HD-DVD.

And Lazy Game Reviews!

And the quality and explosion were high quality and topic was on point =)

glennac I also remember Avery label makers, buy Dymo seemed to be much more heavily marketed in the USA.

How is this video pointless?

Just see the whole video....

+thegrimyeaper 0:06, he also explains why at the end of the video. Turns out he didn't need to do any of the things he did on the video.

Yeah, I guess it could be defined as pointless when the actual uploader does so himself.

Yes, just like stupid region locks. Relatively easy to hack to region free.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

Well, that's how most SATA BR players work :) .

i wonder if the weird TV with a built in DVD player that my gran used to have (which we now have, as a spare TV as it is so small) is also like that

loved the ending!

This has been my rant ever since Blu-ray was released.

Flippin' heck!

yes... :-) Finally another proper ending with the puppets! THANKS! 4K vs UHD however... depends on the definition in use. There are the various CINEMA 4K resolutions, (the main one being DCI 4K for the Digital Cinema System Specification), and there are the CONSUMER 4K resolutions. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME, but both are 4K formats by name and definition. UHD is a CONSUMER high resolution standard term, and there are TWO UHD resolutions, 4K UHD and 8K UHD.

Not to diss the puppets, but I meant his conclusion, felt... familiar :P

I watch digital and if I like it I will buy it. I also pirate music but will buy it if I like it (if I can find it)

@@stimpsonjcat26 agian thats great if you do. But like i said you dont actally own those movies and music you buy digitally. Your basically renting them .

While I agree, mostly, I have hundreds of movies on my movies anywhere and uv accounts and I’ve only seen one disappear (and that was actually iTunes). I’ve only purchased/redeemed through VUDU and iTunes though so maybe others had more issues. I don’t see the issue if it comes with the disc or if there’s no other way to get the movie. Some movies they only do HD through cable or digital (granted its likely just an upscale or 720 copy done for a DVD, but still better) and there isn’t a disc release. At full price though I don’t really understand digital since you can get the disc for basically the same price and often get a digital copy anyways so why wouldn’t you want the disc? Still with UHD requirements and data caps along with poor high speed access here in the US I doubt digital only will happen for at least 10-20 years.

@@pauleckert4321 that's only when they use DRM, there are some good sites like 7-digital that offer DRM free media and also in flac

Paul Eckert actually with music it’s much different. The many cloud services today allow you to make one or multiple backups of your music, so you can save it. Plus apps like Spotify make it so you don’t even have to buy the music, it’s all available for streaming. I don’t really understand why that person has to pirate music when you can simply stream it.

I'm going to presume the Atmel Micro Controller is really only there to store the new firmwire.. Firmware is very small on most devices and made it such a way that you can't tweak them. If the company makes a 128K firmware, it has to be 128K sized firmware.. The Controller, i bet expands that memory issue.

Ha ha, same here.

Regional sleep, 17:41 here

Hannah Skarlett 00:42 here in Sweden.

11:59 here :D

Try Sleep# www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/sleep/9ppgrg6t7dcj :)

Luis Cales why would you not watch the bluray then? It's a lot less compressed then any streaming service I know

I buy the discs and rip them to my hard drive without any extra compression so it's still the same quality. The disc sits on the shelf for the inevitable day the hard drive dies.

@@MadBiker-vj5qj what disc ripper do you use

@@georgehunter3013 the go to for BD is MakeMKV.

Mad Biker 3020 Jeez, do you just have tons of external hard drives laying around? Blu-rays are like 40 gigs uncompressed.

I've only just started buying Blu-ray discs this month! It definitely has a different feel to streaming. Just collecting my favourites for now though.

I won't be surprised if it was a Philips DVD player, as I remember hearing about a similar method to unlock the one I have. It has something to do with rapid code entry or something along those lines. Meanwhile, I remember I had a Samsung portable DVD player (back in 2007) that I bought in Singapore, so it was set for region 3, but then I took it on holiday to Australia and wanted to watch movies I rented from a Blockbuster there, so while I was in my bedroom in my second home there, I looked up some info, and found I could unlock it. I was happy that I could play rented DVDs on my portable player in my bedroom (I had a TV in that room at the time) rather than watching it in the living room where the rest of my family there would've been watching some channel on satellite TV instead.

Some DVD players could be easily unlocked by inputting a combination of codes. With blu-ray they really locked it down and made it harder.

I can't wait for a video about celery from Techmoan now !

I don't see why it wouldn't...the custom firmware is already there...kinda like with PSP with the Pandora Battery...once you had the CFW installed, you didn't need that battery installed anymore

You might still need it to switch the region in standby mode.

I think it would still work as it does now, since the firmware only needs to be loaded once onto the main board. It's not resetting the firmware each time you plug in the power cable.

But wasn't it the original player that now worked with the Top Menu fudge? The older player always needed the hardware mod - so now you have the ability to watch Non region B on another system/setup

By fix it, you mean screw it up even more?

Ha, I rarely mark things on the board but I always decide to do it next time. I do some SMD and I wear cheapest big +2 reading glasses on top of my prescription glasses, found that to be the most convenient magnification and I tried dozens of things.

Sounds like a great pro tip!

That's a solid tip.

In a way that is quite ironic, since Sony make movies themselves.

the board that techmoan ordered has a Sony variant where you do the exact same thing (press the coloured buttons while in standby to change region locking), so they probably discontinued it because another model has replaced it

Dymo and plenty of 3rd parties make it :)

Still viable after all of the years.

They stream in 4K, but the bitrate of the video is drastically reduced to allow them to stream it. So no, with less bitrate and harsher compression, Streaming services do not offer better quality then what you would get on physical media.

On some players I've seen this trick mentioned.

He did, months ago.

Did he ,I never knew that I'll check it out thanks,👍

@@flux1969 You're not the only one who didn't know! At the end of some videos there's a "comedy" link box, that's it. Or just click Techmoan's name.

And with net neutrality in flux, expect additional surcharges for 'premium content' to show up. Then you can pay more for the same service, Yay! I swear commisions need a major rewiring.

Just pirate the damn movie instead of giving money to a corporation that doesn't care about you or your rights.

I love the physical touch of a gramophone record, a VHS and audio cassette. Watching it spinning around round is mesmerising .

@@leonidas14775 Because I still believe that the people who work hard to produce the things I like should be paid for that work.

@@AmigaA-or2hj It's a tactile thing. I get that.

I still buy VHS...

Aye. Besides CD's I also buy records and rip them lossless too (For albums that aren't available on CD/ are cheaper on vinyl), or otherwise.

While I use Spotify more than I buy CDs - I still buy them...

Dino

I still buy LP's and VHS

I agree with Gabe Newell on the issue. Region locking and limited access only means that there's a reason to pirate.

In my opinion, if a company is screwing you over with DRM or let's say ads in a paid service, like Netflix did recently, they have no right to complain about people pirating their stuff. They are scaring off their customers and it's their fault. If piracy can deliver a better experience than your paid service, you're doing something really wrong. Also I'm not against piracy, I think it's a great thing and it doesn't make companies lose money at all. And also without piracy many people on Earth wouldn't have access to certain media, for example in Cuba piracy is the only way for people to enjoy media from the rest of the world because it's not available for purchase in their country.

Region lockouts are not DRM* and they are not meant to stop piracy. They create artificial market fragmentation to charge different prices in different regions. *) DRM is meant to check if you own the content you try to access.

No. DRM is digital rights management. It doesn't check if you own it. It checks if you have the right to access it. If you're using an incorrect region player, you don't have the rights to play it. So yes, region locking is DRM.

Digital Restrictions Management. Fixed it.