This'll end up being more of an arms race than it was for DVD. With DVD there was really only one workaround for region encoding, checking the region number in the menu VM.
For Blu-ray, there's BD+, which will allow pretty much every disc to include code to say "Is this one of the BD players that has a region-free hack for it, and if so has this player been altered? Oh yes it has, shut it down". And, joy of joys, this'll mean BD+ will be on even more discs, which will increase the amount of content where you have a random chance of seeing it play on your player.
They - the technology side of the BD group - should have done what the HD DVD people did: realize region encoding is yet another inane scheme that causes more harm than good, and kept it out of Blu-ray. Unfortunately the Blu-ray people were too keen to "win" against HD DVD and ended up giving Hollywood pretty much everything they wanted, knowing full well it'd damage the experience for end-users. So we have BD+, and we still have region encoding.
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This'll end up being more of an arms race than it was for DVD. With DVD there was really only one workaround for region encoding, checking the region number in the menu VM.
For Blu-ray, there's BD+, which will allow pretty much every disc to include code to say "Is this one of the BD players that has a region-free hack for it, and if so has this player been altered? Oh yes it has, shut it down". And, joy of joys, this'll mean BD+ will be on even more discs, which will increase the amount of content where you have a random chance of seeing it play on your player.
They - the technology side of the BD group - should have done what the HD DVD people did: realize region encoding is yet another inane scheme that causes more harm than good, and kept it out of Blu-ray. Unfortunately the Blu-ray people were too keen to "win" against HD DVD and ended up giving Hollywood pretty much everything they wanted, knowing full well it'd damage the experience for end-users. So we have BD+, and we still have region encoding.
This is one major reason why I don't like Sony.