I sat down to watch a movie with a friend the other night and a forgotten problem reared its ugly head again. I was attempting to play a Region 4 DVD in a laptop that was born in Region 1. Since the laptop is running WinXP¹, I was warned and prompted to change the region setting for the DVD drive. I reluctantly agreed, not wanting to futz with computer stuff while my friend was waiting for the movie to start.

New Zealand has held a stance on protecting consumers from region coding. However, many computer-component DVD drives have region coding built in. Since my DVD collection includes both Region 1 & 4 discs, switching back and forth is a very short-lived solution, and given that switching is recorded in hardware, undoing it is very difficult.

My options are largely based around software DVD decoders that don’t involve checking/setting the region. This is normally not a discussion, since the linux-based movie players do software decoding. Herein lies the final hurdle: for some reason that I have yet to discover, all of the movie players that I’ve tried have recently stopped being able to resize video to full-screen. I haven’t had the time to investigate this enough to come to a solution, which is why I was playing the DVD on the laptop in the first place, but it’s really starting to annoy me. I will need to solve this one properly if I’m going to be able to live without a TV/DVD player in the house.

¹ This is the second time since purchased in 2002. The reason is that Analog Devices does not have a tool-chain for DSP development that runs under linux.