How are DVD player multi-region hacks discovered?

John_Gray

Since most DVD player manufacturers seem to make it fairly easy to convert their "Region 2 only" players to multi-region (a Mitsui hack is even posted on the Curry's website!) I wonder just how the first person to discover the hack for a particular player actually does it?

Is it a leak from the manufacturer's techies?
Does someone have a look at the firmware and decode it?
Does someone fiddle with all the buttons on the remote and magically hit on it?
Some other mechanism?

I'm just interested from a philosophical point of view - it clearly isn't illegal to convert a DVD player to be multi-region, nor to play validly-obtained US DVDs (for example) on what is no longer a Region-2-only DVD player!

John

Conor_3

You've pretty much covered everything that's done.

Nilrem

I think there are also a number of player models that use the same code (probably due to the same company making the electronics and just bunging different logo's on the front).
It's also handy for the manufacturers as it means that they can use the same hardware with just the region code changed for sale in say Japan and the U.S (R2 ntsc and R1 ntsc), or the EU and Aus (R2 pal and R4 pal),
If anything I suspect most of the DVD hardware manufacturers would much rather just do away with region coding, and so just pay lip service to it (hence the leaks of region free firmware, or instructions on some manufacturers sites etc).

DVD regions were/are one of the great ideas thought up by those wonderful movie companies to try and maximise the profits from their local distributors, and have no legal standing as such in much of the world (in fact in some countries it's illegal to sell a region locked player, they all have to be unlocked prior to sale*).

mini_baz

sa-ht520Hi there, I have a panasonic surround system and was looking for a region unlock code the othe day. Could anyone point me in the right direction, or even have a code to hand? It is a panasonic SA-HT520.