Updates
January 13, 2006
An intriguing question has been posed over in HEXUS.news. A member called Funkstar asked, "If they have to send out a special DVD player to each member of the panel, why do they need to region-encode them?"
The answer, as I see, it simple and underlines the massive futility of region encoding - and the lengths that the studios will go to in attempting to mask that futility.
The first thing to know is that each S-VIEW player is able to play conventional DVDs, as well as S-VIEW discs, as spelt out here by Cinea.
Cinea is [sic] helping address this piracy
issue through our [sic] S-VIEW Award Consideration
Screener Program. The program is based on our S-VIEW secure SV300 DVD
system, which uses specialized, fully featured DVD players that play
both regular discs and encrypted S-VIEW DVDs. The SV300 player also
inserts an indelible, invisible watermark into each copy of the content
as it is played out, enabling forensic tracking if needed.
My presumption why this is the case is that someone came to the conclusion that few of the people expected to use S-VIEW players would be willing to do so unless the machines also doubled as conventional DVD players. Afterall, they'd be thinking, who'd be willing to put up with a DVD player that was used only during a few periods of each year and just cluttered things up for the rest of the time?
Trouble is, once that dual-play feature was decided upon, it was probably unthinkable to make the players multi-region capable. The powers that be have to be seen to be supporting the concept of discrete geographical viewing regions. Also, it might be technically difficult (or at very least, politically dangerous) to have multi-region implemented for S-VIEW discs but not conventional ones.
But this doesn't stop the whole thing from being a complete joke.
It's almost certain that anyone who has any serious interest in movies will be using a DVD player that is, or has been hacked to be, multi-region capable.
And that, I'd presume, includes a massive percentage of the people involved in Oscar-voting who will have been sent S-VIEW players.
Many will not only WISH to play discs encoded for any region but will have to HAVE that capability for their jobs.
So, inevitably, they're going to have multi-region players already and their S-VIEW players will sit alongside them or only be pulled out of a cupboard during the times in the year when they're needed.
And that makes a nonsense of S-VIEW players being able to handle conventional DVDs and for implementing region-encoding on S-VIEW discs.
DRM. Don't you just love it!
