It is those sort of acts that make me regret respecting any copyrights on digital content. Region locking is the typical example. Many commercial DVDs come encoded with what’s called the Region code, restricting play of that DVD to certain regions, relying on the fact the commercial DVD Player specifications enforces single-region play only per DVD player. So if you buy your DVD somewhere, and your DVD player from somewhere else, you’re out of luck. Unless ofcourse if you don’t wanna obey by their pointless rules.

So why is that Region locking there? “The purpose of this is to allow motion picture studios to control aspects of a release, including content, date and in particular, price, according to the region. “. (Wikipedia)

Isn’t that just annoying? At a time where all those motion picture studios are at the mercy of honest people who buy the original copy for  tens of dollars, as opposed to just pirating it from BitTorrent for FREE, getting it faster, cheaper, and easier to throw away if you don’t like it, as you didn’t pay for it. Yet, they chose to have some manners and respect to the content owner, and pay them for it. Why do you need to give them another reason not to respect you, and pirate it! My story here is simple. I got The Blue Planet from Amazon, and got the LG RH299H from Kuwait local showroom. What do I find out? It’s region 2 only! Even though the seller confirmed it’s multi-region.

Ironically, even the DVD Player manufacturers are not convinced of this single-region locking at all, that they make it so simple to break this locking. So damn simple I just had to follow those easy steps the seller gave me. Those steps work for the RH299H DVD Player, and your player may be different keep in mind. You will find loads of hacks on the net if you just search them:

  1. Click on the Home button of the remote control.
  2. Using Left & Right arrow keys on the remote, browse to the Settings menu.
  3. Move down over the Lock icon, don’t click it, just move over it.
  4. Enter “0000″.

That’s it. And not only you have broken the region lock, but the player actually gives you a “Congratulations, you have enabled All Region Playback” message! So DVD Player manufacturers have made the locking to match the specs, made it too easy to break, and they’re happy you did :).

Ohh, and what did you get out of that motion picture studios? Just more hate and reasons for piracy I presume.

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