Jari Ketola
9 Oct 2000 9:31
According to DVD Debate Warner Brothers is about to bring out new region protection scheme which would prevent the playback of Warner Home Video region 1 DVDs on so called region-free or zoneless DVD-players.
The Regional Code Enhancement (RCE) program is a response to the groving sales of unathorized region-free DVD-players. Apparently the RCE-enabled discs check if the player accepts more than one region code, and refuses to play if it does. With most region free DVD-players this shouldn't present a problem, since the region code is usually set exclusively to a single region at time.
Atleast two upcoming movies, WHV's The Perfect Storm and Columbia Tristar's The Patriot, are known to feature RCE. According to my own test's also Rushmore from Criterion Collection has a similar "protection" -- it plays back with my DVD-player set to region 1, but refuses to play when set to region "all".
I'll get back to the topic after I have received my copy of The Patriot.
Source:
DVDDebate.com