New Copy Protection for DVD's

[mkelley]

Well, OT but relevent to your point is the even worse practice of a director who takes his *own* movie and reedits it and then only releases that version so you're stuck with it.

We all know about Lucas doing this -- but the worse offender in my mind was Spielberg and his butchering of Close Encounters (both in the theaters and now, unfortunately, forever on DVD) and the rerelease of ET (with political correctness ruining a wonderful moment -- is *everyone* in Hollywood completely soft in the head?)

[housepig]

Well, OT but relevent to your point is the even worse practice of a director who takes his *own* movie and reedits it and then only releases that version so you're stuck with it.

all I can say is, I'm glad I'm not a Star Wars fan ... because that would royally piss me off.

[ChrisX]

One frustrating thing with regions I personally find is if a movie is released in say Europe, but the North American distributor takes that same movie and cuts it up for Reg1 - your damned with the crappy release.

I do find the same in Australia and just as annoying with some R-Rated Region 4 DVDs released here as modified or edited compared with the US releases of the same DVD titles.

I've seen cases of films edited by as much as 5 to 10 minutes here. These are examples: Braveheart, Cobra, Clockwork Orange, Ransom, The Wild Bunch and many others. Eyes Wide Shut is considered to be edited in the US.

However, some films are released as unedited as the same as in the US and a few formatted as NTSC as well. The Australian TV color system is PAL.

I noticed some films released here in Australia are in some cases coded as Regions 1 and 4 and Regions 2 and 4. They are as NTSC DVD American-Australian and PAL DVD British/Australian releases respectively and a few are like that here.

[phatslug]

...
There *may* have been syndication agreements in the past that prohibited such things, but it's pretty clear there are no such rules now.

I think you're right... "laws" wasn't the right word to use there.

However just in Futurama's case I'm pretty sure 5 years is the actual lenght. This of course thanks to FOX, and as a fellow fan of Futurama, you probably share my hatred for them.

[txpharoah]

If anything, I'm jealous of UK getting early releases or outright getting things we'll never see. I shop amazon.co.uk more and more. Gotta love hacked Apex machines too.

Futurama is all out in the UK isn't it? Although expensive, and we just got the first season on DVD.

[igalan]

I'm surprised that no one pointed this out. No matter what the industry says, I think that the main reason of the DVD region codes are to sell the DVDs as expensive as possible. You can't sell a DVD in Asia or Africa at the same price than in Japan (just to name an example).

A DVD usually costs 2xVHS, but manufacturing a DVD is probably 1/10 of VHS with the same movie (forget the extra crap they include). They want to make as much profit as possible. That's it.

Most movies are now launched at the same time worldwide, and also DVD are launched worldwide at the same time, so this is not a good reason. What other reasons can be to prevent DVDs sold in one region to be played in anther? With satellite tv you can watch tv stations from all over the world.