Comments on Profile Post by Cspirou

Imagine if a Foo Fighters CD you bought in the US was region locked and you couldn’t play it on Japanese CD player.

I was livid when I discovered DVDs did this

But isn't region-free DVD-player hacks still a thing? Don't buy one that can't be done.

lol I can still remember when Avatar came out on Blu-ray, I went and bought it and then couldn’t even watch it for a few days cause I had to wait for a firmware update for my Blu-ray player to get new drm codes or some shit

@SoupRKnowva …and that kind of hassle causing over control is exactly why blu ray failed. Apple refused to even put it in their computers because of all the restrictions and fees and red tape. Corporate assholes got what they deserved.

@Cspirou Sony did try to add DRM to CDs, infamously with a Mariah Carey CD, but the DRM could be defeated by drawing a circle on the inside of the disc with a sharpie. I believe that was intended to prevent copy from a CD-ROM drive though, not region locking.

At the time CDs were created, no one thought about what happens if the tech evolves to the point where people could easily and cheaply copy the discs. Once that did happen with CDs, the companies were quick to make sure that couldn't be so easily done with DVD and then Blu-ray. There simply isn't a protocol for region coding that exists with CD, the tech was never designed for it.

Also at the time CDs were created, music companies were facing slumping sales across the board and were happy just to have a new product to flog, they didn't care if shops were importing them from other countries because the market was so nascent. Anything that could drive CD sales was good in their eyes.

@Merrick - I remember that and it was definitely to prevent ripping.

I never knew what happened if it was used with a Linux or Mac system. I’m pretty sure it probably played like normal

As bad as region coding is, I remember them trying to push divx which was absolute horseshit

@Cspirou DIVX was the devil. Just pure greed from the studios. It rightfully died an awful death and contributed in the long term to Circuit City's demise.

The album I remember doing it was contraband by velvet revolver. It auto ran and installed a root kit so when you tried to rip it it was all garbled. But if you turned off auto run or used a Mac/Linux it ripped fine lol

Wasn’t a reason to push SACD was because they had copy protection that CDs didn’t have?

Of course they needed to have features like higher resolution otherwise there was zero reason to switch from CD redbook. But I feel like the real reason was so you couldn’t rip it

@Cspirou Yes, and that is IMO the most effective disc based copy protection out there. There are still precious few devices that can be hacked to output the digital signal from an SACD.