re: #590 pre-Boomer Marine brat

You’re right about the zoning, and I have toyed with the idea of getting a multi-zone player. There are some 40’s/50’s vintage British war movies for which it’d come in useful.

I just found this on some DVD site

Ensure you buy a Multizone (RCE-free) DVD player- region coding really sucks and should be banned! Region coding is a distribution protection mechanism whereby DVDs encoded for one region are only playable on players which are from that region (unless the DVD is region 0 - all regions). Don’t blame the player manufacturers for region coding though - this is mainly the fault of the movie studios (the MPAA - Motion Picture Association of America) so they can stagger movie releases throughout the world. The movie studios are concerned about piracy, but when DVDs are fairly cheap and some countries have released only a handful of DVDs or the DVD only applies to that country (eg Japanese Animation films, BBC videos etc) why make life much harder for the poor consumer? For further information, have a look here

Interesting…we can blame the Americans for this :-)