12-18-2014, 09:41 AM
cpd2009 Wrote:Region coding affects me sometimes, mostly attempting to play certain R2 discs on my computers. Part of the reason why I backed off on making Lilly a media PC is that VLC is unable to play certain R2 discs that I have, especially those that have Macrovision copy protection. R1 Macrovision discs such as Disney titles strangely do play fine with VLC. Only way to get a truly region free drive is to modify the drive's firmware, but I am uncomfortable about doing that since there is risk you could brick the drive. I managed to get my no-name Chinese region-free DVD player from a home improvement store on Black Friday in 2011, and despite some quirks, it plays my PAL/R2 discs well.Well, my big beef with this is PCs are supposed to be region-free systems. Valve has just desecrated on holy grounds like Microsoft did with Windows 8 and it's stupid XBox Games and Zune dependencies. As for modding drives, this is why I insist on Lite-On drives. Lite-On keeps the Australian and Hong Kong markets in mind and making a drive region-free involves just sending the correct ATA string to it, for which there's a program to do so. Heck, one can even fully reset the vendor change limits. Sure, back in 1998 Lite-On drives were giving me trouble, but now I practically swear by them.
cpd2009 Wrote:In other news, I decided that later this evening, I am going to go back to my old HP S2031 widescreen monitor. Max works, but his image is not as clear and sharp as it should be since his actual LCD dimension is slightly smaller than it should be. Text is slightly blurry, even at 1366x768 which is the maximum resolution he supports. The HP monitor has VGA as well as DVI, and I would like to switch back to DVI. But I seen DVI KVMs on eBay, and you're right... they aren't cheap. May as well stick with VGA and continue to acquire the remainder of my setup next month.Well, the reason is DVI implements HDCP. Again, HDCP is the main cause of the price hike (and is there because the MPAA mandates that all digital signal transport must be copy protected. And they get a cut of the license fee, plus a cut of the royalty for every device sold).
You want to know how much my 4-port DVI-USB KVM cost me? RM650, or around US$200. All just because of HDCP. On the other hand my 4-port VGA+PS2 KVM only cost me RM80, or around US$25
The Best Medicine > Magic. Because SCIENCE! can prove the former.