And the weirdness of Region coding/Free keeps going now with LOST

[John_Edwards]

Originally Posted by atomik kinder

Still locked? It is always going to be locked unless they re-release the title. There is no magic unlock button. It is encoded on the disc, therefore a disc that is locked is always going to be locked.

Well, I don't really agree with that. First of all I was talking about batches. When a title is first released, how many discs are pressed? 100.000? 1000.000? Eventually they run out of copies and have to order some factory somewhere to make them more discs. When that happens, can't they simply include the order to omit the lock? A lock is nothing more than a flag you set via the blu-ray authoring system. I probably boils down to a single bit being flipped somewhere on the disc.

Maybe more importantly, yes, the magic unlock button DOES EXIST. The blu-ray specification includes the ability to download updates for titles and such an update can in fact influence the DRM rules and that includes the region lock. Unfortunately, vendors can also use this mechanism to add region locking to a title that was initially unlocked, but that's another thing.