Microsoft Can’t Resist Dumb Protection
A word to the wise: If you have an old DVD drive, don’t upgrade to Vista. Rather than disable region encoding for older drives, Windows Vista won’t support the drives at all.
See, computer DVD drives manufactured prior to 2000 used Windows to detect the region of DVDs, rather than doing it on the drive itself. Since the driver that did it was problematic and buggy, and the Vista driver test team can’t find a good working test unit, they’ve decided to simply disable DVD movie playback for those drives.
Nevermind Microsoft could have just junked the old system and simply set Vista to just play the damn movie if the drive is older. Nevermind region encoding acomplishes nothing. No, if you were good enough to keep a drive in good condition all this time, Microsoft is just saying, “Eh, whatever. Screw you”.
This is completely unnecessary. As the blog post even admits, this will affect practically no one. So why not eliminate the problem for those few, instead of eliminating the hardware?
Some people have been slowly upgrading over the years their systems piece by piece, because they don’t have enough money. Now, if they shell out for a Vista upgrade, if they’ve updated their hardware to support Vista, and if they’ve saved their DVD drive since they don’t need a newer one, now they have to buy one, because Microsoft wouldn’t screw region encoding.
They’d rather screw the customer instead.
Contually upgrading your DVD drive will end up being such a hastle that you might as well buy a brand new computer.
Comment by Raquel Heney | December 9, 2005
[…] Well, Microsoft said not too many people had the old, RPC1 DVD drives that they will deliberately cripple in Windows Vista. Now, we’ll see if they were right. Well, Slashdot has picked up on what I reported almost a month ago. If there’s an uproar from drive owners, maybe MS will rethink their position. Posted: 1/1/2006 by Nathan Weinberg in: […]
Pingback by » Slashdot Picks Up The DVD Story InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel | January 1, 2006
[…] Microsoft’s decision to drop support in Vista for older DVD drives which require software support for region encoding opened a can of worms, not just for stranding a few users, but because region encoding continues to be one of the more obnoxious impositions on the PC industry by the movie studios. As the commenters on the original post point out, it is a restriction that makers of consumer DVD players are able to avoid. Undoubtedly a molehill, but of the most annoying kind. Posted @ 12:06 pm. Filed under OS - Client, Windows Vista, Coopetition, Internet Explorer, IE7, Conferences, Google, CES06 [Permalink] […]
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