Almost a year and a half ago I had spent some portion of my Summer of Code money to buy a MacBook. It was one of those white ones, which at that time had cost me around Rs. 58000. I had bought it from the Imagine store in City Centre, Kolkata.
Since last month I had been spending some money regularly in buying original DVDs of movies like Rising Sun, The Longest Day, For a Few Dollars More, and a few others. Again from a couple of shops -- Starmark and M3 -- in City Centre, Kolkata
Just yesterday I received a DVD of There Will Be Blood from Big Flix (or is it Big Flicks?) by virtue of a subsidised subscription through one of these shopping malls in my neighbourhood.
So what does one do when he/she has a laptop and some movie DVDs lying around? Push them into the drive and fire up the media player. So I did that. Now what is supposed to happen? The movie is supposed to play. But alas, it did not.
It so happens that the sadists and swindlers of this world has made their way into the corridors of high power and conjured up something called hardware region encoding. So the world is divided into 'n' regions with each region having its own code and one is only supposed to see those DVDs which belong to the same code as their DVD drive. Now if people can sit in Kolkata and munch chocolates from Japan, United Kingdom, UAE, Poland, Russia and South Africa, then why can not the same be done with a movie DVD? But, oops, I am digressing. Sorry.
Ladies and gentlemen, I bought the laptop and the DVDs from the same shopping mall and hired the DVD from the same city from an Indian company. Now am I not supposed to be able to play DVDs procured from the same region as my DVD drive? Last time I checked different parts of Kolkata did not fall under different region codes. So how is it possible that on popping in my DVDs I need to switch the drives region code to that of North America, or South East Asia? And mind you I can only change it 5 times. So all things considered I might not get to see more than half a dozen so-called authentic DVDs.
Way to go! Brilliant. I will clap my hands the next time these cheats climb up the stairs to show off their next digital gimmick, but till then I will be using MEncoder and Thoggen on my good old GNU/Linux desktop to rip as many DVDs that I can lay my hands on. And early next month I will get my self a terra byte of storage to archive all of them.
PS: For what it is worth, I use GNU/Linux on my MacBook.
