Region coding, and all the other tricks the movie studios and DVD movie industry are using to limit purchasers rights are, in my view illegal.

Region coding especially makes my blood boil. Consider this – I have lived in and purchased DVDs in Australia, Asia-Pacific and now Europe regions. So this means I have to purchase three different DVD players for both my lounge TV *and* computer to play these DVDs. No wait… there’s more – I have to buy *four* DVD players because as a non-US resident I find that many movies which I wish to buy (yes legally buy – I’m not a criminal copier)are *only* released for region one. So screw the customer.

Personally I think there should be a class action lawsuit brought against all movie studios, with penalty being they have to pay to make every DVD player in the world region free, and stop producing region coded DVDs.

How about: stop with the un-skippable warnings and advertisements,
*every* time I watch the freaking DVD. It’s my copy, I paid you for it,
stop asserting control over the way I watch it.

How about: stop with the anti-free-market “region coding”, preventing me
from playing any legally-purchased DVDs on any legally-purchased DVD
player.

How about: stop with the content scrambling. It is completely inert
against copyright infringement — any criminal can copy the DVD, bit for
bit, with the scrambling intact. It only restricts the DVD owner from
using their choice of equipment.

Or, how about: movie makers, to hell with the DVD movie “industry”.
Make your own DVDs, stop forced-play of warning and advertisement
tracks, stop scrambling the content, stop region-coding the content, and
treat your audience as customers instead of criminals.

Rent-seeking middle-men: I hate you.

The people who really need to be smacked though are the ones who put a 15 second audio clip on loop for the main menu.

play -noflash ~/Data/film0000.dat &
rm -rf ~/Menu

I think punishing law-abiding consumers with odious UOPs (user operation prohibitions, the “unskippability”) and shoddy UI design is in fact the primary motivation behind such “lawbreakers” as “DVD Jon” Johansen, and the makers of such crippled DVDs would do themselves a favour by focusing on the disease, not the symptoms.

Then again, I’m an idealistic, verging-on-socialist technocratic optimist. Compared to that, it’s easy being green.

Those Disney DVD makers obviously haven’t sat down with their 2-year old child who wants to see “Nemofisken” (“Finding Nemo”, ed.) NOW and for the umpteenth time have to say: “In a moment – it’s just about there… wait… hold on…”

Spider-Man comes to my mind as a specifically HORRIBLE example of a menu, that is, a perfect example of how NOT to do DVD menus. (Or my DVD player needs a more RAM – a lot!)

And whenever the “Special Features” listed on the backcover includes “Trailers”, “Posters” and “Animated Menus” – hello! ?#!!??#

Perfect examples of how it’s supposed to be done are the “Lord Of The Rings” DVD’s – excellent job.

On a related note: The bright spark that decided to put an unskippable 30 second “Piracy is bad mm’Kay” trailer at the start of a slew of recent, shop bought DVDs (including some impressively expensive box sets), I hate you too, and wish to poke you with a stick.

I also just love (not really) all those Disney DVDs that lock you into watching the previews by disabling the menu button (actually, you can usually skip through them with the forward button, but that’s annoying enough). First of all, the ads are just annoying in general. Second of all, we probably already own most of those movies. Third of all, after a few years, the ads that say “Coming soon” are out of context. Feh.

.. and the DVD equivilent of the annoying all Flash Webpage.