Jari Ketola
24 Jul 2001 16:00
The DVD Forum, which controls the licensing of the DVD standard, is playing it tough with the Chinese and Taiwanese player manufacturers. The players, such as the Apex AD600a are infamous for the ease of bypassing the region encoding.
To be allowed the license to manufacture DVD-players, and use the DVD logo, manufacturers must agree to support the region encoding restriction. The Far Eastern manufacturers, however, usually implement a rather haphazard restriction which is often very easy to bypass using the unit's own remote controller.
What DVD Forum is doing now is enforcing a ban on unofficial DVD products. To beat the ban the manufacturers must get a certification for their players before October 1st. After that no player without a certification can be shipped with the DVD logo.
It remains to be seen whether or not the Far Eastern manufacturers will bow to the demands. If they don't, we might see alot of "Digital Video Players" or "DVD-compatible MP3-players" in the future.