THE DIFFERENT DVD REGIONAL CODES BASIC ELECTRONICS INFORMATION

WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT DVD REGIONAL CODES?


Motion picture studios want to control the home release of movies in different countries because cinema releases are not simultaneous worldwide. Movie studios have divided the world into six geographic regions. In this way, they can control the release of motion pictures and home videos into different countries at different times.


A movie may be released onto the screens in Europe later than in the United States, thereby overlapping with the home video release in the U.S. Studios fear that copies of DVD discs from the U.S. would reach Europe and cut into theatrical sales. Also, studios sell distribution rights to different foreign distributors and would like to guarantee an exclusive market.

Therefore, they have required that the DVD standard include codes that can be used to prevent playback of certain discs in certain geographical regions. Hence, DVD player is given a code for the region in which it is sold. It will not play discs that are not allowed in that region. Discs bought in one country may not play on players bought in another country.

A further subdivision of regional codes occurs because of differing worldwide video standards. For example, Japan is region 2 but uses NTSC video compatible with that of North America (region 1). Europe is also region 2 but uses PAL, a video system not compatible with NTSC. Many European home video devices including DVD players are multi-standard and can reproduce both PAL and NTSC video signals.

Regional codes are entirely optional for the maker of a disc (the studio) or distributor. The code division is based on nine regions, or “locales.” The discs are identified by the region number superimposed on a world globe. If a disc plays in more than one region it will have more than one number on the globe. Discs without codes will play on any player in any country in the world.

Some discs have been released with no codes, but so far there are none from major studios. It is not an encryption system; it is just one byte of information on the disc which recognizes nine different DVD worldwide regions. The regions are:

■ Region 0 – World-wide; no specific region encoded
■ Region 1 – North America (Canada, U.S., U.S. Territories)
■ Region 2 – Japan, Western Europe, South Africa, Middle East (including Egypt)
■ Region 3 – Southeast Asia, East Asia (including Hong Kong)
■ Region 4 – Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Central America, South America, Caribbean
■ Region 5 – Former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Russia, Indian Subcontinent, Africa (also North Korea, Mongolia)
■ Region 6 – China
■ Region 7 – Reserved
■ Region 8 – Special international venues (airplanes, cruise ships, etc.)

In hindsight, the attempt at regional segregation was probably doomed to failure from the start. Some of the region standards proved more complicated to finalize than was originally expected.

There were huge variations in censorship laws and in the number of different languages spoken across a region. This was one of the reasons why DVD took so long to become established. For example, it is impossible to include films coded for every country in Region-2 on a single disc.

This led the DVD forum to split the region into several sub-regions. And this, in turn, caused delays in the availability of Region-2 discs. By the autumn of 1998 barely a dozen Region-2 discs had been released compared to the hundreds of titles available in the U.S.

This situation led to many companies selling DVD players that had been reconfigured to play discs from any region. For several years now games console manufacturers (Nintendo, Sega and Sony) have been trying to stop owners from playing games imported from other countries.

Generally, whenever such regional standards were implemented it took someone only a few weeks to find a way around it, either through a machine modification or use of a cartridge adapter.

In real terms, regional DVD coding has cost the DVD Forum a lot of money, delayed market up-take, and allowed third-party companies to make a great deal of money bypassing it.

THE DIFFERENT DVD FORMAT TYPES BASIC ELECTRONICS INFORMATION

WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT DVD FORMAT TYPES?


The three application formats of DVD include DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, and DVD-ROM. The DVD-Video format (commonly called “DVD”) is by far the most widely known. DVDVideo is principally a video and audio format used for movies, music concert videos, and other video-based programming.


It was developed with significant input from Hollywood studios and is intended to be a long-term replacement for the VHS videocassette as a means for delivering films into the home. DVD-Video discs are played in a machine that looks like a CD player connected to a TV set.

This format first emerged in the spring of 1997 and is now considered mainstream, having passed the 10% milestone adoption rate in North America by late 2000.

The DVD-Audio format features high-resolution, two-channel stereo and multi-channel (up to six discrete channels) audio. The format made its debut in the summer of 2000 after copy protection issues were resolved.

DVD-Audio titles are still very few in number and have not reached mainstream status, even though DVD-Audio and DVD-Video players are widely available. This is due primarily to the existence of several competing audio formats in the market.


DVD-ROM is a data storage format developed with significant input from the computer industry. It may be viewed as a fast, large-capacity CD-ROM. It is played back in a computer’s DVD-ROM drive. It allows for data archival and mass storage as well as interactive and/or web-based content. DVD-ROM is a superset of DVD-Video.

If implemented according to the specifications, DVD-Video discs will play with all the features in a DVD ROM drive, but DVD-ROM discs will not play in a DVD-Video player. (No harm will occur. The discs will either not play, or will only play the video portions of the DVD-ROM disc.) The DVD-ROM specification includes recordable versions - either one time (DVD-R), or many times (DVD-RAM).

At the introduction of DVD in early 1997 it was predicted that DVD-ROM would be more successful than DVD-Video. However, by mid-1998 there were more DVD-Video players being sold and more DVD Video titles are available than DVD-ROM. DVD-ROM as implemented so far has been an unstable device, difficult to install as an add-on and not always able to play all DVD-Video titles without glitches. It seems to be awaiting the legendary “killer application.”

Few DVD-ROM titles are available and most of those are simply CD-ROM titles that previously required multiple discs (e.g., telephone books, encyclopedias, large games).

A DVD disc may contain any combination of DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, and/or DVD-ROM applications. For example, some DVD movie titles contain DVD-ROM content portion on the same disc as the movie. This DVD-ROM content provides additional interactive and web-based content that can be accessed when using a computer with a DVD-ROM drive.

And some DVD-Audio titles are actually DVD-Audio/Video discs that have additional DVD-Video content. This content can provide video-based bonus programming such as artist interviews, music videos, or a Dolby Digital and/or DTS surround soundtrack. The soundtrack can be played back by any DVD Video player in conjunction with a 5.1-channel surround sound home theater system.

The DVD specification also includes these recordable formats:
■ DVD-R – DVD-R can record data once, and only in sequential order. It is compatible with all DVD drives and players. The capacity is 4.7 GB.
■ DVD-RW – The rewritable/erasable version of DVD-R. It is compatible with all DVD drives and players.
■ DVD+R and DVD+RW – The rewritable/erasable version of DVD+R.
■ DVD-RAM – Rewritable/erasable by definition.

The last three erasable (or rewritable) DVD formats—DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, and DVD+RW—are slightly different. Their differences have created mutual incompatibility issues and have led to competition among the standards.

That is, one recordable format cannot be used interchangeably with the other two recordable formats. And one of these recordable formats is not even compatible with most of the 17 million existing DVD-Video players.

This three-way format war is similar to the VHS vs. Betamax videocassette format war of the early 1980s. This incompatibility along with the high cost of owning a DVD recordable drive has limited the success of the DVD recordable market.