Regionalized Blu-ray Discs

Earlier this week I bought a BRD version of “Produced By George Martin,” a documentary on the great producer of The Beatles and others. Unfortunately the disc would not boot in any machine I own.

Although it was not labeled as such, it may have been one of those rare regionalized Blu-ray Discs. Either that or it was just plain defective.

It seems to me, in this day of internet internationalism, that region-coding discs is a copyright concept long past its “sell-by” date. It should not be continued into the future.

You mention "rare regionalized Blu-ray Discs". I just randomly pulled out nine BRDs and six of them were region A (the Americas, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia) two were regions A, B, and C (the only three regions for BRD), and I was unable to find the region code on the other one. So "rare" may or may not be accurate.

Look on the BDR label and the back of the box. There should be a small hexagon with the region letter in it. There may be more than one.

Or it may be, as you said, a bad disc. I would not be surprised, however, if the disc was using some copy prevention which your players did not support. We have DVDs that will play all of our players except one. These are all new discs. The problem player has no issue with older discs.

Wikipedia wrote:

According to the Blu-ray Disc Association, all Blu-ray Disc players and Blu-ray Disc-equipped computer systems are required to enforce regional coding. However, content providers need not use region playback codes.[164] Some current estimates suggest 70% of available [movie] Blu-ray Discs from the major studios are region-code-free and can, therefore, be played on any Blu-ray Disc player, in any region.[165]

Movie distributors have different region coding policies. Among major U.S. studios, Walt Disney Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, and Sony Pictures have released most of their titles region-free.[166][167][168][169][170][171] MGM and Lions Gate Entertainment have released a mix of region-free and region-coded titles.[172][173] 20th Century Fox has released most of their titles region-coded.[174] Vintage film restoration and distribution company The Criterion Collection uses US region coding in all Blu-ray releases.

The Blu-ray Disc region coding scheme divides the world into three regions, labeled A, B, and C.

I just pulled out three BRDs at random, all three are region free.

When you say they were region free, do you mean that they displayed all three regions codes, or that there was no region code shown?

One (Hancock) is all three regions. The other two, Hail, Caesar! and L.A. Confidential, have no regions listed.

I have not been able to find a definitive statement as to whether or not a BDR with no region listed is compatible with all three regions' players. One would suppose that, but there seems to be a lot of ambiguity with BDRs and regions.

I read one article that said 4K BDRs are not region limited when played on a 4K BR player, but the same disc is region limited when played on a standard BR player. Strange.

The region coding is for box office protection. Movies are still new in the theaters in some countries when the DVDs have already been released in others. I'm not sure if the internet has a great effect on this concern.