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Anime News

HD-DVD: Region Coding Could Be History
Date: 10/7/2005
The DVD Forum Japan Conference 2005 was held on Friday in Tokyo. Standardization developments on both DVD and HD DVD fronts were discussed by Toshiba and the road map toward the future was covered. One of the main topics of the event was the fate of region coding on their new high definition format. For American anime fans, this is the thing that prevents you from playing DVD's imported from Japan or Europe on your average store-bought DVD player. Toshiba Digital Media's Chief Engineer Yamada Takashi spoke on this issue. On traditional DVD, 6 regions globally are allocated into special lockout zones. Players sold within markets exisiting in these zones can generally only be compatible with the same region coded media. According to Yamada, "Maybe, the region playback control will not enter HD DVD." During the development of HD-DVD, region control was privy to all shades of opinion. He didn't consider the technology as a very positive feature and it wasn't introduced into their Steering Committee.
What's more, the concept of copy control within the contents industry has changed also. DVD sales had began stagnating in Japan as of 2005, and with over 300 units hitting the market every month, securing shelf space is difficult. Therefore, Only selling titles are arranged in the shopfront with no space for many catalog titles. Some copy protection measures are still being considered such as the AACS introduced "Managed Copy" and the use of "Localized DTCP" in the case of LAN network video delivery. This technology would delay playback transmission for 7ms or less while the user's network IP is scanned and deterimined to be to be a local environment. Playback would then only be permited within this range. Piracy is also being tackled by the AACS, one current plans calls for a digital watermark to be placed in the audio of films being screened in theaters. Then, when someone trying to sneak a personal videocam in and record it illegally, goes on to make copies, they would be stopped instantly during the reproduction process when this signal is detected. The medium standards are expected to be finalized by November.
Source: Anime News Service