Bloody Region Codes!

We've had a PS3 for a while, you might remember. Aside from the fact that the copy of PS3 Monopoly I ordered from play.com went AWOL after New Year and never actually arrived, we've had a lot of fun as a family playing Buzz and Trivial Pursuit, the girls have enjoyed playing Avatar, Oblivion, etc, we've really appreciated being able to stream the upscaled BBC iPlayer on the plasma screen, and naturally the Bluray movies are awesome and even the upscaled SD movies are pretty good. All things considered we were pretty happy with it.

Until yesterday, when we tried to watch The General's Daughter and got nothing but a terse little "beep" and the message "this disc cannot be played as it has the wrong region code."

Not this bollocks again? I went through this with our old Samsung DVD player, having to hack it to play non-region 2 disks. We never had the problem with our chipped XBox, because the people who write XBMC have sense enough to ignore the corporate control-freak mentality of the whole region code crap. Must have just been a coincidence that in the months since we bought the PS3, we've never chosen to watch any of the DVDs we bought in Canada.

I jumped online to search for "PS3 multiregion hacks" - expecting it to be a simple matter of casting some kind of arcane spell through the remote control - and was amazed to discover that after three years, no such hack exists. The region encoding of the PS3 remains intact and, worse, no-one has really bothered to try and crack it because, as most forum-dwellers complain, Sony would simply annul the hack at the next (automatically downloaded) firmware release.

So it looks like around 20% of our DVD collection is unwatchable on the new system. At least, in its disk-based form. There are plenty of instructions online on how to rip DVDs to MP4, or AVI, or VOB format, any of which will play quite happily on the PS3. Which, if anything, makes me even more angry. It confirms the pointlessness of the regional encoding, but forces me to jump through hoops in order to watch a huge chunk of our collection that we BOUGHT LEGITIMATELY.

Is it any wonder the big media companies are losing money to pirates when they put this kind of barrier in the way of legitimate users?

The silver lining to this cloud is that it simply brings forward the day when we move our movie collection onto a media centre, where it can be accessible from anywhere in the house and not subject to these pathetic restrictions.