The Struggle for Liberty in Movie-Watching
Or, How I Became a Citizen of the World
Living in America has many advantages, a nice life being the most important. However, for a restless European, some of the parochial leanings can be frustrating. The worst offenders here are the stumbling blocks on my way to a cosmopolitan cinematic experience. Simply put, unless whatever-you-want-to-see is made in the US or for the US market, your chances of being able to watch it are slim to none. With VHS tapes, you will have to deal with PAL, the European video standard, which NTSC VCRs won't play. With rare foreign films, you may have to pay huge bucks because your library copy is protected with Macrovision (I never understood why: exactly how many people will be making huge profits pirating that 1934 Ozu?). With DVDs you get both plus the additional obstacle of region coding (RPC). The dice are loaded against you ever seeing anything that is not sanctioned by Hollywood and the marketing staff.Or so it would seem. There are good people out there and many foreign companies manufacture all-region NTSC DVDs (e.g. most Hong Kong releases), which have the additional advantage of costing only a fraction of their Region 1 counterparts. This is great for Asian films, but not for European stuff, which is still Region 2 and PAL, or Japanese stuff, which is NTSC but Region 3. And what about the Region 4 PAL stuff from Russia? Such a mess! The following brief account is how I managed to overcome all these and have an AV setup that can play and copy any DVD and any VHS tape from any region of the world.
The Battle with Region Codes: The PC Theater
I finally broke down and converted one of my computers (the original BANSHEE desktop machine) into an almost-dedicated eye candy station. It's old and it's laughably poor in terms of computing power with its venerable Pentium 200 MMX and 64 MB RAM, but with a 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 it had some prospects for low-rez graphics. I got rid of the ancient and flaky WD Caviar HDD and replaced it with its fat 17GB grandson, then killed Windows 98 (or, to be precise, induced it to commit suicide), and installed that other resource hog, Windows 2000 Pro. At least now it does not crash. It does not run, but it does not crash either.Your inquiring mind is probably asking itself whether Branislav has gone completely nuts from his sugar-heavy cornflake diet: what possible utility can such a dinosaur have in the slick world of multimedia? For software decoding, none whatsoever. For hardware decoding, plenty. I equipped the vanilla system with Sigma Designs' superb REALmagic Hollywood Plus DVD decoder card (I'll wax eloquent about it later) and Toshiba's fast SD-M1502 ATAPI DVD-ROM drive. This is unbeatable for the price: the combo was $140 shipped from Provantage. The 3rd generation Toshiba is 16X/48X, with a 128K buffer and reads every CD/DVD medium including Martian imports. The H+ card provides MPEG-2 playback at up to 1600x1200, is HDTV upscaling, has S-video (and composite) TV output, does on the fly NTSC<->PAL frame conversion, and even has a remote (sold separately)!
Independence Day: No Regionalization without Representation!
Today is June 28 and Independence Day is approaching fast. In honor of the great event, I liberated by digital video setup from the tyranny of Region 1. Previously, my options were limited to (a) modifying my Sony player, a very expensive proposition, which might have involved shipping it off to the UK, and (b) purchasing a region-free player, which would have been both expensive and wasteful since I already had a player. With only $140 spent, the world of R2 and R3 DVDs became open at last! Now, the Toshiba is RPC-2, which means it is region-locked with only 5 region changes before it becomes permanent, which can only be reset up to five times through an authorized dealer, for a total of 25 region changes.THIS MEANS WAR! A quick visit to The Firmware Page reveals that there is a patched 1012 RPC-1 firmware, which might work unless the drive's firmware is the newest revision 1002, for which there is no region free solution! With great trepidation, I run CDVDinfo and discover that my firmware is at revision level 1008, which is supported by the patch. A quick floppy boot to plain real mode MS-DOG, and 10 seconds later the deed is done. Back to Win2k with CDVDinfo happily telling me the drive is unlocked! My Toshiba is no longer slave to the infernal DVD Consortium, which has been spreading its evil tentacles over the planet in an effort to monopolize your viewing experience. So, the SD-M1502 is now region-free forever. (I won't be running any firmware updates on that baby!)
Hurrah... but not so fast. It turns out the H+ card is not without aspirations for world domination of its own: it also has a region-lock, damnit. Now, this is getting preposterous. It should rely on the DVD-ROM drive for enforcement of the Consortium's code, not run its own petty-tyrant agency in its stead. But with the Toshiba free, the H+ decides to bravely muck around with my viewing pleasures. Stupid card. With the ultra-spiffy freedom-fighter Zone Selector, the diabolical scheme is soundly defeated, with the side bonus of disabling that other monopolistic spawn, Macrovision. By the way, since this program does not work with the newer H+ drivers, one should definitely consider shelling out the measly $15 to register the superb, if somewhat deceptively named, Remote Selector, produced by Erwin van den Berg's Visual Domain. Version 1.79 (for registered users only) works perfectly with H+'s Win2k drivers v2.2 build 139_5, which (in case the new ones are no longer compatible) can be downloaded from here: part one, and part two.
Thus endeth the heroic struggle for freedom from RPC-2. I can attest that the DVD playback of the Toshiba-H+ combo is stunning. Not bad even on the computer monitor, but great through the S-video link to the TV and the SPDIF digital out to my receiver. By the way, the Unofficial Hollywood Plus FAQ is a great resource for all things related to the card, including improvements in performance.
The Battle with Macrovision: The VHS Theater
So you want to tape some of your minty fresh DVDs for your grandmother? Or, if you are like me, you don't believe in paying more than once for a movie? Well, how do you do that? Easy. Connect the DVD player to the VCR, pop in a blank tape, load the disc, and press "Record". When done, you will most likely be amazed at the result: the picture is unstable, alternates between very dark and very bright, and is severely distorted at what seem like regular intervals. Congratulations, you've discovered Macrovision, which is designed to prevent you from doing exactly what you just did. All VCRs sold in North America for the last decade have the darn chip (it is illegal not to). Unfortunately, most US DVDs also come with Macrovision: the plague is contagious. One option is to have your player modified. Techtronics' Multimod also removes Macrovision in addition to defeating the region protection. Unfortunately, they are expensive, very expensive. They are also in the UK. Another option is to see if your particular player can be modified easily or simply hacked, usually with the remote. Some players can, but my Sony DVP-530S is not one of them, Sony being the owner of Columbia Pictures and thus neck-deep in the conspiracy to enforce the regional coding. Unfortunately, I don't know of many players that can be hacked to disable Macrovision (even if they could be made region-free).No way out of the quandary? You give up too easily for the legends are true. There indeed exists the mythical product that easily, for under $120, can free your DVD, VCR, and nearest relatives from Macrovision. It is also legal (to buy, not to use for what you will be using it). The little gadget, which is quite useful for what it was designed to do, is actually a video color corrector and image stabilizer: SIMA Color Corrector Pro, which you can buy from AVDeals for the paltry $119.99 bucks. Well, it is not advertised well, but since Macrovision messes with the gain in the signal, "image stabilization" ends up defeating it. I got one, it works flawlessly, and I have been happy since. Now I can tape all my DVDs for my great-great uncle to see.
The Conquest of PAL
Caesar may have conquered Gaul, but the Europeans have never been defeated in their persistence to maintain higher-quality video standards than good ole NTSC. Most Americans don't give a hoot about PAL for they will probably never express interest in anything they can't buy locally anyway. For a good European that lives this side of the pond, such attitude is not permissible. There are way too many good films and music that cannot be had easily on NTSC (all these bootlegged Dimmu Borgir concerts). Also, how is a guy supposed to watch all the Bulgarian films his parents keep sending him? Of course, anything can be converted for a fee but at $25/hour, this is an expensive proposition. Now, one could buy a multisystem VCR, but that only means it can read and output PAL, so without a multisystem TV it won't work. Naturally, 99% of TVs sold in the US are NTSC only.Having already bought my Trinitron and being a poor student, I could not afford to just buy a new TV (and a new multisystem VCR). So, the last resort: a PAL<->NTSC convertor. There are some excellent semiprofessional grade convertors for around $800, but that's just too much. Also, buying a standalone converter still meant having to buy the multisystem VCR to play the PAL recording. How about a multisystem VCR with a convertor built in? Yep, such beasts do exist and for $450, Samsung's SV5000W Multisystem Converter 4 Head Hi-Fi Stereo VCR will read and convert all major video standards with the exception of SECAM-L, the Gauls being saparatists as usual. NYC's very own and very reliable B&H Photo Video still sells it, although a bit higher at $499. The VCR is very high quality and does an excellent job at conversion. Mechanically, it is quieter, faster, and smoother than my nationalist Sony. It has Macrovision, but then I have the Sima CC Pro.
The Forever War
Guess what? It's been two years since the events described above ended with the total liberation of my AV system from various lordships. Although not exactly rolling in cash, I now have a more or less steady income which is just about sufficient to buy most of the DVDs I want and all of the DVDs I don't need. However, my salary is pitifully short of enabling me to afford more than a rented two-bedroom in La Jolla, CA (the most ridiculously overpriced land off the Moon). The end result: One very small room for my expansive AV hobby. Implication: No room for computer. Consequence: inability to watch regionally-locked DVDs. Conclusion: WAR.I left the sturdy Sony DVP-530S in Salt Lake City where nobody ever needs to see foreign films unless it's Sundance and one is not from SLC. I packed the ageing desktop in preparation for inflicting a donation on some unsuspecting school district. I then looked around for a multiregion player that could convert PAL on the fly.
Having heard great things about the Malata players, I naturally bought the less expensive Daewoo DVG-9000N progressive scan player for $169.00. It can be hacked with the remote by entering a finger-defying sequence that lets you into its regional menu. It worked. Well, it almost worked.
The Daewoo does not display anamorphic PAL properly. Apparently, there's a bug in the chip and the picture ends up squished. There is no way to correct this. As I only had one such DVD at the time, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could live with this shortcoming for a while. But then the cheap Korean crap showed the true extent of its lacking workmanship by swallowing a disc and refusing to let go. No amount of cajoling, threatening, pleading, and praying in tongues could induce this spawn of Satan to relinquish the digital flesh. So I unleashed the Phillips screwdriver, took it apart, and physically removed the disc from the plastic (!) cradle. With some trepidation (as I am known to end up with spare parts every time I put something back together after taking it apart), I replaced the cover and popped another disc. Some unhealthy creaking later, I saw the light on the TV.
But I had not seen the light because I ignored the flimsy construction I had witnessed when removing the stuck disc. There's a reason why you won't be seeing any more Daewoos on American roads, and don't let anyone tell you it's Ford's fault. It's all about (lack of) decent engineering. To make this short, I should not have replaced the cover because the player developed an insatiable appetite for discs and apparently derived enormous pleasure from ticking me off by swallowing discs at random intervals.
Naturally, I could not stand this any longer and, under the pretext of its buggy PAL conversion, dumped the player in my poor sister's lap and got myself a new Malata DVP-520 for $239.00 off some nice guy on eBay. I had not been that happy since my parents explained to me that although Santa Claus did not exist, Show White surely did. The player does the anamorphic PAL conversion properly (although there is a slight shimmer along the lower edge of the upper black bar). It has tons of really cool features, the most useful being the zoom which eliminates the TV overscan that sometimes loses you 5% of the picture. I've had the player for about 10 months now, and I have not had any problems with it. It also detects the region automatically, so there's no need for the three-finger salute with the remote.
The NeverEnding Story
But what about the office, I hear you say. Most people labor under the misapprehension that the office is the place where one does useful stuff. Maybe for any honest line of work but not in academia. Here, the office is where one browses the net for hours, gossips with colleagues, drinks liters of coffee, goes to lunch, then afternoon tea, and takes well-deserved breaks from all this every 30 minutes. (Where do academics work? At Starbucks.) With this demanding schedule, a 24-inch Sony Trinitron monitor, and a surround system with a subwoofer, it did not take long to start thinking about ways to get my Thinkpad's built-in DVD drive to "behave".Item: the Thinkpad A31 comes with a RPC-2 DVD/CDR+W combo drive that cannot be unlocked (no firmware update as of today). Item: it is preset to Region 3 for some unfathomable reason. Item: PowerDVD, which I purchased fair and square, also wants to enforce all sorts of ludicrous restrictions, including, but not limited to, regional protection, forced copyright notices, Macrovision, and general honesty. Taken together, these items seem to suggest that I am totally out of luck and will probably have to revert to using an external (hacked) player.
Not so fast! I stumble across an unbelievable product, Fengato Software's DVD Region-Free. This little puppy removes the region locking for RPC-2 drives, RCE discs, software players (PowerDVD and WinDVD among others), Macrovision, and enables skipping of tedious introductory warnings. All this without ever touching the firmware. It simply sits on top of the drive's interface and decodes the streams on the fly. I bought it ($39.95, free lifetime upgrades of which I've taken advantage twice already), installed it, and I am here to testify that it works as advertized. Amen, brothers and sisters. It seems that for now the fight for Liberty and Entertainment has been won hands down.