So what did Bitscape, obsessive nut that he is, do last night until way after bedtime?

That's right. After watching a way cool Farscape episode, it was more futile attempts to get Argo's DVD drive to play my movies. By looking at message output to the console by the kernel, I was able to narrow it down to something to do with the drive not thinking my discs had the correct region. Since all my discs are Region 1, this led me to ask, "If not Region 1, then what the hell region is this silly drive set to?"

Well, how much detail shall I go into here? Let's just say I was going so far as to make a DOS boot disk (something I haven't done in a while) in an attempt to use a hack to get at the damn thing's firmware. That didn't work either. (Although I may try it again later. Maybe. If I ever need multi-region capability.)

At some point, I also opened up Argo's case to look at (and attempt to identify) any possibly relevant jumpers on the back of the drive. Another deadend.

So, finally at 2300, being dead tired, I went to bed with the front of Argo's case left open.

Another day, a lunchtime coworker consulting session, a few more google searches in the evening, and a freshmeat later, the needed hack was found. A tool to detect and switch the region.

I found out which region my drive was: "unset". Hah. Morons. Someone ought to give the people who designed these idiotic drives a very hard bop on the head.

I set it to Region 1.

"4 region changes left."

Yeah, I had found out about that on mailing list archives too. The drives have these numbers hardwired into the firmware. You can changed the region so many times, and after that, it will stay locked into whatever region it was last set to.

That is one thing that makes even less sense than the rest of it: Why? Isn't this just going to encourage "piracy"? (Not really piracy, but copying for one's own personal use.)

Suppose I find some obscure cult movie which is only available in Region 4. I buy it. I want to watch it, but I also want to watch the rest of my region 1 movies. So what do I do? Use up one of my credits to switch the region to 4. Copy all the files onto a device with a less flakey media access system, switch back to region 1, and then watch it from the "illegal" alternative source forever more.

Well, anyway, after I set the region, used the cssauth code to unlock the disc, getting the xine player to interpret the datastream was a a simple matter.

And oh, the sweetness of victory!

So... Argo is now capably of playing Region 1 discs. I could theoretically try to go back into DOS boot disk mode and run the firmware patch which removes region restrictions entirely. Since I have no pressing need to play non-region 1 discs at the moment, I think I'll just keep it in a safe place on my hard drive for a while.

Fullscreen mode with this thing is actually pretty damn smooth. Maybe an occassional frame skip here and there. And xine seems to have this funny bug where it sometimes blanks the viewing window unless you show and then hide the play controls window again.

Pretty damn cool though. Much sharper than the tv. For cinematic viewing experiments, I would still prefer the larger tv output. But for examining and disecting frames close up and in detail, the PC screen is the way to go.

(I'd do a screenshot, but xine uses the X-Video Extensions, which preclude screengrabs. No, not a silly MPAA scheme to prevent "piracy". A hardware optimization, which just happens to leave software that tries to grab the contents of the screen out of the loop. I'd have to use a non-optimized player to make screenshots.)

So...

This is pretty rockin. I can sit here and ramble with a movie playing on the same screen just centimeters away from my vi window.

In celebration of this event, I think I'll write a check and send it with the form I recently received from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And then maybe go to bed a little early tonight.