Cracking the DVD kaboomdoggle

The household has always been pretty lazy with the flashy home entertainment hardware. We must be one of the few expatriates who do not (nor do we plan to) own a satellite dish that *cough cough* picks up signals from the Philippines or Thailand. Our only form of television entertainment revolves around DVDs that we play on Neil’s PS2 (you got it, we don’t even have a DVD player — it took us a year to buy a television, so I’m sure you understand).

So, just yesterday, I dropped into one of our local DVD retailers and picked up The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. Since the film premiered just this month, I presumed the WB holographic stickers and snazzy packaging was just another way of fooling us *cough cough* gullible foreigners into thinking we’d bought the real thing.

I did some work last night, so I felt entitled to a late night movie, and what did I find? The bloody thing’s regionally-encoded — it’s a legal, authorised copy. So I can’t watch this bloody movie until I (we) buy a proper DVD player. I can’t even hazard a guess as to how long it’ll take us to get round to doing that.

(I really ought to keep on top of this new-fangled technology.)

(Yes, both our laptops have DVD players, and I’ve searched for software that will enable me to *cough cough* overcome this RPC-II problem, but my particular software encoder, or is it decoder, is not listed as being compatible with the utilities available for download.)

So. A movie premieres in the cinemas of the United States of America, and the authorised DVD appears in China within a week? Is that the way it’s supposed to work normally, or is this the studio’s way of trying to beat the pirates? If it’s the latter, welcome! Do that for all movies, please.

• 9 Jun 2005