DVD play

[Kevin Alan Martin]

My brother recently purchased an Apex DVD player at Circuit City for $180.
While being a very basic player (no DD decoder onboard, etc.), it has a
hidden "Loopholes" menu accessed by certain button presses on the remote
that actually allow the user to disable not only the region coding but
also Macrovision and CSS encryption (even though most DVD discs won't play
properly with the encryption turned off).  Surprisingly, this unit also
allows the playing of VCDs, CDRs, and MP3s that have been burned onto
CDRs.  All-in-all, pretty surprising, I thought, for such a budget player.

My Samsung DVD-907 I purchased at Best Buy back in April also supposedly
allows all regions to be played by a remote code, though I haven't had the
chance to fiddle with this yet.  I'm thinking of picking up Bounce ko-gals
or Samurai Fiction to test this ability (though I hear that Bounce isn't
even region coded to begin with...).

Kevin