Page 1 of Region Code Enhanced DVDs (RCE) Can anyone help?

I have a Toshiba SD 210EB DVD player (3 years old). It`s multi-regional (came from Richer Sounds) and plays R1 DVDs without problems. However, I`ve noticed that some R1 sites issue warnings like the one below with some of their titles:

Please Note: Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE): has been added to certain Region 1 DVD`s. RCE will prevent the DVD from playing on some "Multi-Region" DVD players.

Any idea if this is a major problem or is it just to put people off??.

RCE means DVDs which are Region one have to be played with a machine set to region 1. So the usual trick of setting the DVD player to region 0 won`t work, especially with handset hacks. The chances are the hardware will detect the disc region and automatically change to region 1. However I`m sure there are people who know better than me - especially with this specific model.

Actually, it`s more a case of DVD players that have been permanently hard-wired to play all regions cannot play R1 RCE discs.

Those with handset hacks can usually be made into a Region 1 machine only, which overrides RCE then - eg MediaTek chipset powered DVD players can be hacked with, say 13690 for all region, and 13691 for Region 1, 13692 for R2 and so on.

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Clayts, Moderator, DVD Reviewer
UK webmaster for Area 450 the independent Sampo/Maxent DVD site

It`s not a major problem now as it`s all but been abandoned. Basically, when most discs check a machine they just check to see if it will play a disc from that specific region. Most older mods simply allowed machines to report that they were capable of all region playback, thus allowing them to play anything.

RCE differs in that it the discs are actually coded for all regions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, All. If your machine is an all region machine it will pass this bit and begin to load. The disc then asks it to report what region it is, in reverse order (All, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1). If the machine returns any region other than 1, the RCE message will be displayed. Of course, when queried an all region machine will return `All`, and so the disc won`t play.

There`s really no way of knowing if your machine handles RCE without trying it. My old Toshiba SD100 didn`t but I could get around this by stopping the disc, hitting the title button, selecting 1 (or whatever title I wanted to watch), and then pressing play. If I then cleared the title selection the whole movie would play back (if I forgot to do this it would try to return to the main menu after playing title 1). The downside to this was that you needed to know what titles were what, and you couldn`t navigate discs through the menus.

Pretty much all machines can play RCE nowadays, especially if they allow manual region selection through the firmware (as many budget decks do).

This item was edited on Friday, 14th January 2005, 18:45