You Can See Right Through Me

This is so cool. It won't be so cool to everybody, but to the right people, this is gonna be great.

I had to buy a new DVD player. My old one, a Christmas present from my brother David, finally gave up the ghost. So I started looking around for another one. I found this one. I'm sure there are others like it, but I just set mine up and I thought it was pretty cool. So why am I throwing the "cool" around? Because it's got a free hack to make it Region Free, listed right on its Amazon page.

I've got some specialized tastes in TV and movies. I love British stuff, like Doctor Who and Hustle. Both are great shows, and available on America TV and DVD. There are a few shows that I'm big fans of, or would like to be big fans of, like Life on Mars, Spaced and Jeckyll, that aren't availble in these United States. Worse yet, there are some American shows that aren't available over here at all. And, since DVDs are region-encoded, meaning that DVD players are coded for the region you live in, that becomes diffcult. A British DVD won't play in an American DVD player.

It was the Sci-Fi Channel show, and big favorite of mine, The Invisible Man that started me on this crusade. I love this series, as did a couple of friends of mine. I wanted to get the series as a present for them, but even if I could get the DVD, it wouldn't play. I looked into a bunch of solutions, and then found out about region-free DVD players that would play discs from anywhere. So now, it means that I can buy the Invisible Man DVD from Amazon.co.uk and play it over here. It doesn't help my friends, of course, but they can come over and watch it if they want. Or they could get their own.

Anyway, I'm a little stoked. It's going to take a little effort to not start strafing the Amazon.uk catalog. And, sure, shipping's a little bit of a hassle, but since The Invisible Man came out on DVD in 2004 or so, and there are still no plans to release it in the US, for the right stuff, it's worth it.

Now if only Now and Again would come out on DVD.