Watching movies in our household has always been a little complicated. Thanks to the greedy bastards who designed the DVD format we are restricted to only watching DVDs that are sold in Japan, and unfortunately they are way overpriced here (a typical DVD is about U.S. $30-40). Since I have a significant collection of DVDs from the USA, a couple of years ago I managed to find an off-brand DVD player here in Japan that accepted a secret code entered into the remote control (found via the internet) that allowed access to all our movies without any restrictions. These region-free players are hard to find in Japan, mainly because the big electronics makers here are also involved with the selling and marketing of DVDs, so it is in their interest to prevent people from buying cheaper stuff overseas and using it here.
All these restrictions made it tricky to watch movies that we already own, but with the region-free player everything was simplified. Recently I found a blu-ray player that had a lot of great features and a low price tag, so we took the blu-ray plunge.
Blu-ray has been fairly popular here in Japan as a recording format for quite a while. For the last few years the only way to buy a blu-ray machine (other than a PS3) was to buy a blu-ray recorder (and those were way too expensive). Now stand-alone blu-ray players are starting to show up, and the one we got was just under 20,000 yen (about $200). Out of the box the player handled our Japanese DVDs just fine. Then I downloaded some sneaky code off the internet and burned it to a CD, and once I inserted it into the player it became region-free as well.
The bad news is that the blu-ray playback remains region-restricted as nobody as found a way around that yet, but the good news is that for blu-ray Japan and the USA are in the same region, so we shouldn’t have any problems playing discs from either country (although I have yet to test it).
The player also has a USB port so I can put the TV shows that I download via bittorrent on a memory stick and watch them on the big plasma screen in the living room – that’s a big plus. Anyway, so far so good, but I’ve got to get my hands on some blu-ray discs from both the USA and Japan to test ’em out.
