Junjie’s China blog

Don’t buy Original Movie DVDs in China

My original Terminator 3 Rebellion of the Machines DVD. Plastic waste.

Warning: Never buy fake DVDs, that’s illegal.

This time I was in China I also bought some movies to watch them later at home. Watching movies in Chinese is one of my Chinese learning methods. So I bought a bunch of DVDs in Hong Kong, made sure it was typed 国语 (guóyǔ - Chinese) on the DVD case backside and put them in my bag. Now at home I discovered what a mistake. Those original DVDs don’t run in my DVD drive properly. They have a different region code than my European DVDs and I can only switch my CD/DVD drive’s region code only 4 times.

What is a region code?

Until that day I never encountered something like region codes. So I did a quick Google and found out. Someday in the past some big fat money guy was bored and thought about an idea how they could earn more money. So they thought that the world should be divided in regions. And then they decided that each CD/DVD drive should be assigned to a region. Every CD/DVD drive then should only be able to play only CDs or DVDs assigned to that matching region. In his tremendous benevolence the big fat money guy furthermore decided that CD/DVD may alter their region setting a few times. In case of my Lenovo Thinkpad R60 drive this is 4 times. After that I can only watch movies of one region, the other movies are lost.

That sounds like unfair

Yes, very unfair. While I’m not sure about all the goals of this measure I can guess why these were introduced. Here are my guesses:

• To let the big fat money guy earn more money
• To protect our environment: Oversee bought DVDs have to be transported by plane to their destination first, what a fuel waste.
• To prohibit cultural understanding: DVDs in a different language can better cultural understanding. Big fat money guy says no to this. Maybe he wants the people to remain dumb?

Avoid buying original movie DVDs in China at all costs

The movie industry is crying because most of the movie DVDs sold in China are copies. No wonder: People would rather buy a illegal copy than a movie that is not working at all with their DVD drive. I can only warn You: Don’t buy that not-working shit. I’m not saying to buy illegal copied movies, that would be illegal, so don’t do that. But what is important to me: Don’t buy originals if You plan to use European or US DVDs at the same time. Big fat money guy will only rip You off Your hard earned money.

Now that You have saved some money I can recommend You to make some holidays. Enjoy some adventures in Shilin Stoneforrest or enjoy a cold beer in the Hump Bar Kunming.

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