Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

The magic to turn the Philips DVDR7300H into a region free DVD player doesn’t yet seem to be common knowledge, so I may as well report it here. Thanks to the magic of search engines, the information will then soon rapidly spread around the Web.

To make your player region free, first turn it on and ensure there is no DVD in the tray. Then, hit [Browser] on the remote-control. Finally, and without hesitating between each keypress, enter the following incantation:

__[Play] 159 12 12 12 005 255 [Play]__

If you hesitate between any of these keypresses, Error will be displayed in the top right of the screen. If, on the other hand, you enter the above sequence correctly, the player will offer no hint that it has, in fact, positively reacted to your command. UNIX-esque, it is.

Assuming all went well, place in the tray a DVD mapped to a region other than the one for which your player was crippledmanufactured (and don’t use a region 0 disc either, obviously). With a little bit of luck, you should find that it now plays instead of producing an error message.

It continues to irk me that DVD player manufacturers continue to handicap their products in this stupid and ineffective way. Why not just sell the bloody machine region-free in the first place? I know all of the arguments why this isn’t done, but they only hold for a player that is hard-wired to a particular region and can’t be reconfigured.

If you’re going to make it possible to reconfigure the player via the remote control, you may as well supply the unit in an unhandicapped state to begin with; or at least supply the required code in the manual (but that would just serve to indicate how trivial and thus pointless the handicap is in the first place). Information wants to be free, as they say, so those who need a region free player will do the research and, assuming it can be done, find a way to make the player fully usable. They will then tell others. Why make life so awkward for everyone?

Another thing that annoys me: the parasitic shops that charge a €25 to €50 premium for making brand new players region free. All they have to do is plug in the unit and type in the code, but they make it appear to be something requiring knowledge and skill. The disrespect that manufacturers show for us, the paying consumer, is creating the circumstances for this parasitic cottage industry to thrive. It all seems so pointless when the full functionality of the player is but a few keypresses away.

As of yesterday, we finally have a DVR in the house. Unfortunately, it’s nothing as configurable and flexible as the MythTV box that I was trying to build not so long back.No, this is the very pedestrian, low-intelligence Philips DVDR7300H.

Just a few of my complaints after 24 hours of use:

• Its GuidePlus+ electronic guide system covers only a small subset of the channels that we receive. Important ones that are missing are BBC3 and BBC4.

• The maximum number of programmes that can be queued for recording is a rather pathetic 25.

• One can not elect to start the recording early to account for imprecise broadcasting schedules.

• The steps by which one can allow a recording to overrun are too rough: 10, 20 or 30 minutes. Why not 2, 5 or a user-configurable amount?

• There is only one tuner, so one cannot record two programmes at once.

• One cannot set a programme to record daily. A daily news programme, for example, would require three of the 25 recording slots: one Monday to Friday slot, plus a weekly Saturday slot and a weekly Sunday slot. This is just plain stupid.

• The machine offers the user no choice what to do when there is a scheduling conflict. I assume it allows the first programme to finish, rather than truncating it and commencing the recording of the next.

• The G-Link IR blaster was a pain in the arse to configure. I need it to work with a Thomson set-top box, which is what UPC’s digital cable package uses. The DVDR7300H requires you to tell it whether you’re using a cable, satellite or terrestrial set-top box, at which point it presents a list of manufacturers. Unfortunately, Thomson doesn’t feature in the list of cable set-top box manufacturers, so I tried telling the Philips that I was using a Thomson satellite box instead. Sadly, none of the infrared codes it sent to the UPC box were successful in changing the channel. Eventually, I got lucky by trying a bunch of different manufacturers at random. Telling the Philips that I was using a Motorola cable box did the trick, but it took a lot of time and energy to reach that point.

In spite of these and other shortcomings, it’s been so long since we were able to even record a programme from the television, that just the reacquisition of this basic functionality feels novel to me now. I’d still give almost anything to have my TiVo back, though. It could do so much more than the Philips DVD-R, which is essentially a piece of rubbish (no intelligence and a very poor UI), and was much cheaper, too.