[Rich A]

Something to add to the discussion. I've been using various ways to create playable TS folders on my HTPC. Lately I've been having some trouble with more and more rips. Sometimes when trying to play them, I will get an error screen that says, "This disk is not formatted for this region".

There seems to be a lot of discussion on the various forums about this. But like most things there also seems to be a ka-zillion different fixes for it, none of which seems to work for everyone.

Here's my take on it. I believe the studios are trying to stop ripping of disks that are "Region Free". Note, usually there are firmware upgrades and such to make your stand alone or PC based PLAYER region free. So you can buy any region disk and play it in your player.

But I think the commercial people are trying to stop the production of region free DVD DISKS. Probably so they can't be pirated and sold to any region.

It seems that most ripping software will by default ?? make a disk region free. I think this new? code that is embedded onto the original disk checks it's own region against that of the player. If they match then it plays. If not, you get that error and it doesn't play. In other words they added DISK-BASED region checking to the current PLAYER BASED region checking.

Now the ripped DVDs that are burned to an actual DVD disk DO play fine everywhere. This new problem only seems to affect a hard drive based DVD TS file that you are trying to play.

So I'm thinking that this disk based region checking has problems working with a Title Set that is hard drive based. I haven't checked this yet, but I'm hoping that the "region free" setting in my ripping software can be turned OFF. I'm not interested in making it play in any region. Just the one I live in. Which is the original region the disk was sold in.

Could this be the simple answer that everyone seems to be over-looking? Any comments?