I was terribly disturbed at knowing the marketing strategy behind the "Cannot Play Discs" problem I get on most DVDs on my DVD player.
It seems since many years back, the CD/DVD industry (and so follows the current blu-ray and HD-dvd industry too) practially decided and divided the world into money zones as depicted in the picture below.. and all DVD players sold in a particular zone were to have a setting 'NOT to play discs sold in another zone'.
The idea behind was to be able to sell the discs at different costs in different markets for especially movie and music discs. So, you cannot buy 100 english movie DVDs in china for a bummer and expect to play it on your DVD in your home in San Francisco.. because then that kills the DVD market of San Francisco it seems.
ok. The hard point is, they make the DVD player itself disabled partially.. to implement the strategy.
Even if justified that it is to survive all markets in a balanced way, they should have done the disabling thing in the CD/DVD technology, rather than the player itself which is purchased at a much costlier price that an average DVD by the consumer.
When we buy branded DVD players we all end up paying for a partially disabled player... because all companies that make branded DVD players have an agreement on implementing the region codes on the players.
The Tip: If you can find, by some means, a way to reset your player's region code to ZERO (usually done through some combination keys on the remote for the player), then you have enabled your DVD player to all the world's discs.
