was it a good idea to make different zones for DVDs internationally?

Answer 1

I think it SUCKS!!!!

First of all you have to find out whether your DVD-drive is a RPC-1 or RPC-2 drive. RPC-1 drives incorporate no zone encoding so they will let you play all zones. RPC-2 drives feature a built-in counter that let you change the zone of your drive five times. After that the player will be (forever) set to the last zone you used.

Apples Region Manager extension changes the zone of your drive if you insert a DVD from a different zone (if you click ok to do so). It also emulates a zonecounter for RPC-1 drives. When you have a zone free (RPC-1) DVD drive, the "DVD Region Manager" manages zone locking (storing the current zone and the zone change countdown in XPRAM), enabling only 5 zone changes. A small patch that comes with DVD++ simply sets the XPRAM to the following values: "No zone selected yet", "5 changes left". Other patches like DVDack also only patch the region manager but not the drive. They therefore work only with RPC-1 drives and are useless with RPC-2 drives.

As far as I know all iMac DVD, G4 and the new Powerbooks ship with RPC-2 drives. It would be helpful to know which drives and firmwares Apple uses for these machines. Firmware patches for a variety of DVD drives can be found at 'The Firmware Page' http://perso.club-internet.fr/farzeno/firmware/

G4 owners can try to patch their MAT****A (Panasonic) SR-8584A firmware to c15C, making it a 'region free' RPC-1 drive using patches (DVD++) found at the site http://www.opuscc.com/download/index.shtml mentioned above. I don't know which DVD drive ships withPowerbooks and the DVD iMacs and whether that patch would work there.

This article http://saturn.spaceports.com/~dvdsoft/dvdinmac.html claims that one can bypass the zone counter by adding a jumper on certain 'Apple' drives. The article unfortunately is not too clear about details :-(

This Apple TIL article http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n60183 discusses (not too deeply...) how DVD region management works with Apple's DVD software.

Answer 2

I don't think so, it's annoying. It means that when people buy you a gift abroad you cabn't play it unless you have a DVD player that plays all zones (I do). It's especially annoying because some DVD's are out in the USA that aren't in the UK and vise versa, and also there are plenty of special edition DVDs that are only done in certain regions. But thankfully I have a region player of all kinds. You can also download region killer to your PC, so that you can watch DVDs from other places in the world. That's a handy download for sure.

Answer 3

for the studios, maybe. for the consumer, no.