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In Reply to: RE: Well… posted by cfraser on March 16, 2009 at 17:54:51:
The data on the stats site in Joe's response to me indicates that 69.35% of the BD releases listed are region free. Assuming that list is a pretty complete list of US releases, then roughly 70% of US releases are playable on BD players sold in Australia and 30% aren't.
The situation is different with DVDs. There was a federal court case here years ago which resulted in a ruling that region free players did not breach copyright laws. If an Australian resident legally acquires a disc, paying copyright charges in the process, they are legally entitled to be able to play it and if that requires a region free player the resident has the right to have a region free player. As a result, nearly every DVD player sold in Australia has automatically been region free for some years.
Now with the introduction of BD, we're back to zoned players. I haven't come across a region free BD player. The situation isn't as bad with BD because more stuff is region free than ever was the case with DVDs, but I'm not aware of any BD players that are region free when it comes to playing DVDs. That means I've had to keep my old DVD player in order to play my few Region 1 DVDs.
I've bought a few BDs from the US but the problem is often getting reliable info on whether or not the disc is region free. Amazon sometimes reports region free discs as Zone A so you have to take a risk based on what the reviews have said. One of the discs I've got from Amazon is region free and plays fine but it states it's Zone A on the packaging so I can't really fault Amazon too much. The review was right and they weren't.
What's interesting is what is region free and what isn't. It varies depending on the film with some labels but some other labels seem to go entirely one way or the other. There doesn't seem to be a consistent rule followed by everyone. It depends on the label and I've seen that I can't rely on the label's packaging to tell me whether the disc is region free or what kind of a soundtrack it really has. That's even more frustrating in many ways than having to deal with the zone system and the fact that sometimes material I want isn't released locally or only gets released months or years after release overseas. I'm quite happy to pay for the discs I want and to purchase them legally, but I'm annoyed when zoning means that I simply can't get and play a disc I want without also having to buy a second player from overseas in order to play it, and then also have to deal with any problems related to differences in our electricity supplies.
David Aiken
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Follow Ups
- RE: Well… - David Aiken 01:02:56 03/17/09 (0)
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