DVD Capabilities

REGIONS

Region Codes are part of the DVD standard. There is a region number within the components required for DVD-VIDEO playback. The region number defines the region of the DVD-ROM drive and its playback hardware/software.

The regions as defined by the DVD-Forum are:

1. USA & Canada
2. Europe, Japan, South Africa and the Middle East.
3. South East Asia
4. Australia and South America
5. Africa and Russia.
6. China

I downloaded the latest version of Drive Region Info to check the status of the region codes for this drive. (RPC-2 Devices allow you to change the drive a certain number of times.)

As you can see its a region 2 (European unit) and has already been changed once (it allows a maximum of 5 changes). Once you have used up your quota the drive becomes region locked and will only play movies from the region the code is set at.

DVD READING / RIPPING

I get the most E-mail about the subject of backing up DVD movies and so I have this small section for those of you who wish to do this.

One hurdle that you have to overcome is that most movies are encypted using CSS (Content Scrambling System), but thankfully it is easy to circumvent thanks to programs like DeCSS, Smart Ripper and DVD Decrypter. The encyption key cannot be copied with a General DVD-R writer -- which is what the A03 is.

The speed of the drive at reading CSS disks is x2 DVD (2.8MB/sec) which you can see below. This is often not revealed in the specs of some drives, for example the Toshiba SD-1502 is a x16 DVD reader but can only read CSS disks at x2 speed.

The above is the Pioneer DVR A03 ripping a CSS protected DVD, as you can see it is also limited to 2 speed but is within specification. (Funny thing is thanks to Toshiba crippling the x16 speed SD-1502, the Pioneer is the same speed at ripping DVDs :D ).

The hurdle you have to overcome is that DVDs branch to certain places and sectors and this information is in the VIDEO_TS.IFO file. You have to change the locations (with IFOEDIT or another suitable tool) or you could preserve the location exactly as the original. (I am also informed that Prassi DVDRep is an easy option). Remember that you must conform to the DVD spec when re-encoding ex. right bitrate and filesystem (UDF1.02) (you could generate an image with software such as DVDMaestro and burn that once complete).

The biggest hurdle you will probably encounter is that most movies are dual layered and this means the movies will be around 8+GB in size -- clearly far too big for a straight copy onto a 4.38GB disk.

Page 5 - Last Updated: 21 October 2001