Blu-ray Region Lock Nonsense

Great video! I just got around to installing the same modchip in my Sony UBP-X700 ("Top Menu" trick didnt work). The Sony board had much finer joints to solder to, but it works! My poison is Arrow BD's from the UK which are usually region locked.

Thanks for the video Mat.

The video wasn't useless, now both machines can play any blue ray. However, you also forgot to mention the pc applications that can remove the region with software.

Personally, it’s never a waste of my time when I learn that someone Who seems to have it all together and gets a hole-in-one every time can make the same mistakes I do! Great video as always! See you in the next one.🙂

You know what would be really funny? A TechMoan "soldering tutorial" video where you (deliberately) make a hash of it. Imagine the Youtube Rage!! It would be pulsating, palpable, truly epic. I reckon you could be a very good professional troll Matt, judging by the odd subtle zinger that you slip into the occasional video. But of course, that would beg the question... "why would you bother?". Best of luck ignoring the idiots mate, keep up the good work!

Curious to know, Matt: Do you place your components on a grounded, anti-static mat when you dismantle and change out circuit boards? Hope so!

I'm late to this one, but that's probably the funniest puppets segment you've ever done. I literally Laughed Out Loud. As the kids say. My 4K player is from Oppo, I at least partially chose it because they added pins to the mainboard so that you can add a modchip without having to solder anything. Convenient! (I have always called them "BDs" rather than "Blu-ray Discs" and I will continue to do so until I am dead.)

Naturally it should be called BRD, Blu-Ray Disk. Thanks for the video! I'm not big on video-tech (I watch 2nd hand DVD's on my 20+ year old TV or go to the cinema) and now I'm a bit up to date. It didn't help my interest that Steve Jobs called Blue-ray "a bag or hurt" (he was talking about patents I guess).

Love this! Another great video and the comedy spot on!!!!!!

Sometimes even when the region is compatible, you can still have issues. I got an A + B region disc from Australia, and my early Blu-ray player choked on the 50 hz video.

If I am given a choice between physical media and online shopping, of course, for the most complete collection I would choose - Pirate's and sometimes a license to VHS years 2006-2008, because there is no other; - PC with Torrent and DC++ network clients on the rest of my life. And a TV with smart-tv software to play it all on the big screen. If I had to choose a technology as unreliable and degrading over time as an optical disk, I would copy it on the HDD for fear of damage.

Very interesting, I did one of those mods on a tiny Sony DVD player years ago, which was a scary process.

Fascinating. I learned a lot from that. I bought a UHD player just last week - didn't realise UHD disks were region free. I now have 7 HDMI outputs and 4 inputs and need 14 mains sockets behind the TV. :-/ I did a lot of research looking up all the cryptic codes on the HDMI sockets. That alone was a learning curve.

OH YES, PUPPETS!

Matt, I have to say, I did cringe at the soldering.. And yet, you know what you *should* have done - tin the pads on the pcb by adding a little solder first then flow the (already tinned) wires onto them. I know it worked, but I think you were lucky - dry joints can cause problems down the road. You always play down your engineering skills, but, having watched you work, I think you are better then you give yourself credit for. BigClive embeds a lot of soldering tutorials in his tear-down videos, well worth a watch ;-)

Why is the machine so big? It's clear from the opening that you could cut an inch off the depth and probably some off the width.

I completely agree with you regarding physical media. I will stream a movie to see if I like it or not, but if I want to own it, I will buy the DVD or Blu-ray. P.S.- I admire the way that you will take something apart, solder it, do whatever you have to do to fix it or modify it. You are a braver man than I- with today's technology, I haven't picked up a soldering gun in years.

Argh, I hate DRM. Thank you for showing people how to break it! Also, what you just did would have been illegal had you been in the United States.

How did you do the explosion at the end?

LOL at the exact same hand-written 'C L' (or C - tick?) on both the instructions and your players PCB!

Maybe you should do an episode featuring the Nakamichi Dragon. Take break from the digital for awhile...

I'm seriously surprised that anyone still bothers locking discs to regions or countries. For DVD's that only worked until the price of the players came down so much that it was easy to just buy a second or third DVD drive on your computer and have each drive set to a different region.

Actually you can make your Panasonic player multi-region quite easily. Go to regionfreedom.com and fill out the form under "contact us". Be sure to fill out the form exactly right or you will just be ignored. Also you have to offer a monetary donation of about 50 Euro to get the firmware and it will be set to your players mac address so it can't be installed on any other player. I've been using this firmware on several Panasonic players and it works very well. Also you can't just only set the region code but also the country code. Some japanese discs check the players country code so you can't play the disc if it isn't Japan. [Disclaimer 1: I'm in no way affiliated to that page.] [Disclaimer 2: I know that some people will think that it's outrageous to ask for so much money for a firmware. But you don't have to solder anything and those hardware mods aren't cheap either. Yes, you get a little piece of hardware but that probalby costs a lot less than what you pay for it.]

I also thought I heard that digital television, when it was about to be implemented, was supposed to do away with regions and standards, making everything universal.

Actually, I kinda thought I'd heard that back at the beginning of the dvd era European dvd players handled discs from other regions far more freely than American dvd players did. I felt it was American authorities telling us here that if it wasn't American, we didn't need it.

The internals of the BluRay player truly show far we've come in simplification since Hi-Vision Laser Disc.

As someone who makes his living making very complicated Blu-rays that fans constantly complain about being region locked, this video pretty much made my weekend.

They say locks & keys are for honest people - inconveniencing them that is.. Copy protection & region locking pretty much fall into the same category

As a cineast I love the bonus content on a bluray like audio commentaries. Some of them are so good you think you are attending a film class. For example the great criterion collection. I bought a region 1 DVD player back in the days only to be able to watch the criterion DVD's (now blurays). Unfortunately no streaming network includes these audio commentaries or any kind of bonus material. So I really hope that good movies will still be available in good versions with lots of quality bonus material in the future. Otherwise it would be a great loss.

Hard to believe Mrs Techmoan wouldn’t want to be part of Korean movie night. Ok, my wife wouldn’t watch The Tunnel series without a bit of coercion - I mean it has British AND French for heaven’s sake! Ok she loves it now. I did laugh at the puppets’ silliness, until I realized I get annoyed at things like the American marketing habit of using “Nu” for “new.”

lol love the outro! unfortunately I don't think I can hack the region codes on my Xbox one S or Xbox one X

Speaking of DVDs, copyright notices and such, back a number of years ago, when I was DVD authoring, I had to do a lot of testing of my authoring before the media went for duplication, so I made myself a backdoor - if you did a partial Konami code of left right left right up at the proper time in the copyright roll, it skipped you past all of the opening crap, FBI warnings and stuff, right to the main menu. My bad, I “forgot” to remove the code when I gave the company the gold master image, so everyone that bought it has my cheat code skip in it too. Doubt anyone ever found it, but fun times.

As usual Mat, a great video, with the puppets a highlight as usual. My tastes run to the vanilla side of the equation, as such I've never had to deal with region settings on my devices. HOWEVER, the appearance of a DYMO label in your on remote reminder really caught my attention. I haven't seen one of those labels in decades. Talk about your retro-tech.

I actually just bought a pre-modded Sony UBP-X800 as my new region-free player last month, replacing the cheap and slow Philips BDP-7501 I bought to get started with UHD BD knowing I would eventually replace it anyway when better players started appearing on the market. My wishlist of titles only available on non-region-A Blu-ray finally reached critical mass to upgrade to a new fast player that would also enable me to collect some of those titles. (As an aside, it amazes me that some great American movies, in particular, are seemingly only appreciated enough to still be in print in Europe...) I considered doing the mod myself. But, the instructions I found for installing the mod on the UBP-X800 showed that it would involve soldering to some of the pins on fine-pitch surface-mount components, and while I have decent soldering ability it wasn't worth the $50 I would save to take the time and risk with a brand new player. It seems all these mods work similarly, even where their installation differs; mine uses the colored buttons on the remote to set the region upon boot. I even recognize the instructions in the video as looking suspiciously similar to the instructions for the mod in mine. Anyway, I couldn't be happier. It seems our buying habits are similar; a good number of my purchases these days are coming from JP and SK and HK, too. Since I'm already in region A, I could've gotten away without a region-free player if it weren't for those pesky region B titles. :)

Flippin' heck! A purely delightful piece on a Sunday morning. Well done on the modification, and top marks on the puppetry!

Hope you enjoyed your Hong Kong Movie Night. Seeing all the empty space explains how Sony was able to make my Blu-ray player so small. Thanks for another good video and puppet outro!

Region locks must be some of the worst that mankind has ever invented. Thanks for a fun video. :-D

"Amazon exclusive" Lucifer? I'm watching that on Netflix. Not in the UK, though. It's funny, because where i live you hardly get any series aired on national TV, Netflix has a bigger selection than the bigger European markets.

Have you entered your clipshow season? 😂

What is that new gadget that the old chap is using in the outro?

Too cool , and I always enjoy the puppets,. Three thumbs up

Enjoyed the outro (and enjoyed the rest too). Several times a spell checker has changed Blu-ray to Blurry which has amused me.

Be honest you were actually looking forward to a Hong Kong Phooey night

I've found that the ubiquity of streaming services means the only Blu-rays I buy are my absolute favourites, whereas when DVDs were king I used to pick up five or six every month. My DVD collection is mostly in boxes in the attic, whereas I reckon my Blu-rays will remain on display in living room for a while yet.

Much nicer than my solution which is to rip the region A Blu-ray disc to an MKV on the PC and then play it from USB on the TV. The software doesn't seen to care that the Blu-ray drive in the PC is the wrong region and rips anyway. All worked well until one disc which had an audio codec the TV couldn't cope with and had to re-render the whole movie, took ages.

I didn’t realise that 4K Bly-Ray discs weren’t region coded, though now you’ve mentioned it it does now make sense why, whenever I search for them on Amazon, a lot of US releases come up without any warnings about incompatibility . I don’t own many 4K BDs and I’ve no great desire to get many more, I’ve not been much of a movie collector on any format for some years though. 4K BluRay does look fantastic; however the only machine I have to play them on is my XBox One S, which is fine for that format, but for most of my old DVDs, some of my 1080p BDs and even certain lower definition content on the Prime Video XBox app, I’m constantly having to toggle between the consoles video output settings of 4K and 1080p. I’m unsure if this is an issue with the XBox or my TV (which is UHD but not HDR) but it gets annoying and kind of puts me off physical media, even though when it comes to music, I will always choose a CD or Minidisc over a computer file or streaming service! If the price of “proper” 4K Blu-Ray machines drop in the next couple of years, I will treat myself but at present, the XBox does a passable, if slightly long-winded, job of playing physical video discs when the need arises.

Never did care for the name "Blu-ray".

YAY!! PUPPETS!

On names: Was I the only one that called my MD player an ATRAC player? Like "I'm going to listen to my nice modern ATRAC player in my car"?

That's why I love my panafonics ub700 as you can top menu trick most discs into working