yeah, release is ONE thing, but pricing is the key. It really started with LD's then DVD's, where in US they were pretty reasonable, but in UK and europe they were VERY EXPENSIVE. So many people would have simply bought them here and taken them there.

So much so, that there was a cottage industry, connected DIRECTLY TO THE RETAILER that would sell and equip your new 800$ DVD player with a region free chip or decoder. We never saw this in the US, since there wasn't a need or market

DVD chipping still existed...
 

But it still existed - even if you weren't aware of it - mainly targeted at people who wanted to watch non region 1 dvd's! And of course there were those nice Apex DVD's players that you could change region on real easy! (I had one(!))

Nowadays I use DVDIdle pro for my region-avoidence needs on a PC... on the TV we use a region free DVD player (which manages to avoid the problems that the MGM and Disney DVD's through at normal region free DVD players)

maybe a misunderstanding
 

Maybe a small misunderstanding here.

We of course had both hardware and software solutions for watching out of region DVD's in the US, what we DIDN'T SEE was this cottage industry where when one would go into a store, (read like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc) the sales person would imediatly offer to the customer the option to have a decoder hardware card, or a software/hardware solution INSTALLED that would allow out of region viewing of DVD's. This is the way it was in UK, FRANCE, GERMANY and SWITZERLAND to my knowledge through the 90's and earler 00's


THAT is what we never saw here, since the DVD's were so cheap anyways, rentals were cheap and available. more so than other regions.

nearly(!)
 

:-)

I guess I'm starting to drive you mad :-)

The main reason we went with a region settable dvd player (and later the s/w on the PC) was twofold:
- we wanted to watch films and TV series that were only on Region 2 - and were never likely to quickly come over to the US region 1 encoding.
- and we really wanted to be able to watch all those region 1 DVD's we'd built up over 7 - 8 years during our stay in the US

Obviously other people may/ will have different reasons, but these were ours

To be fair, before DVDs you would have still had the broadcast standard problem of NTSC, PAL, or SECAM. I'm sure they thought through the fact that there were already incompatibilities between these standards, so it wouldn't be a problem for DVDs to be incompatible.

It's fine to be annoyed at this, but you'd think you'd complain about the new TV right along with this.

I use dvdshrink (www.dvdshrink.org) to copy my dvd's. If you enter the correct region for the original, it will copy it and make it region free.