Region codes, you gotta love ‘em. Hang on, no you don’t! Region coding is one of the silliest inventions Hollywood has ever created to burden us, the consumers.
Even player manufacturers realized this back in the age of DVD and made it really easy to ‘hack’ the player, i.e. to get rid of those RCs. My first DVD player has two DIP switches on the motherboard. One of them disables Macrovision and the other one makes the player region free. Those switches were part of the original motherboard design, not a hack installed by yours truly. And the player manufacturer, you may ask? None other than Sony themselves.
Anyhoo, as you might be aware, region codes are back with a vengeance on Blu-ray. There are now three region codes and it’s no surprise that USA and Europe don’t share the same one. It’s taken a while for the geeks to come up with Blu-ray mod chips, but they’ve finally done it — and I received one today. Inside the envelope is a four-page installation manual, some thin wire and a promisingly complex looking circuit board with one large and several smaller chips on it.
I will publish an article about the entire installation process of the chip on this blog with photos and all. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a while, simply because my soldering skills are clearly inadequate for the task. A friend promised to lend a (non-shaking) hand, but it will be some time before he comes back from his summer vacation. And that’s why this post is titled ‘prologue’.