Nimbus

I have two players for my many other region wants, but will other regions adopt just as the US will or how exactly will that all work? And is this going to be another headachey problem to the "format" wars?

Will other region DVD's even be tempting now that HD-DVD's can handle the more/better content?

Augustes

They are going to a new region scheme. Was that posted here? I know I read it recently, but not sure which site I was at. Something like US/Asia is one, and Europe/Australia is another, with fewer regions total than DVD has.

Other countries are probably going to ATSC, as well. That is part of the HD plan, to simplify the world. But it is the USA that is way ahead since it is mostly a US plan. Various companies and/or the UK govt has announced various plans for them, don't remember details offhand.

I think this means there will only be one format instead of the old NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM mess. Still probably want the capability of multi-region due to various censoring from one country to the next and potentially different extras. But I think the video will likely be less of an issue than the current DVD market, where I have several R2 discs just because they haven't bothered to do an anamorphic version in R1.

Nero

Blu-Ray is set up as follows:

Region 1 (the Americas and East Asia, excluding China but including Japan), Region 2 (Europe and Africa) and Region 3 (Russia, China and Others).

I imagine HD-DVD will follow the same regional coding as DVDs, as they are both DVD Forum formats, but that is yet to be seen.

redford

Those new region schemes were just decided on a few weeks ago I guess, but reports say studios are going back to discuss them again.

Nimbus

As an anime fan, I'm rather excited at the prospect of Japan and America being in the same region.

Augustes

Obviously, they've lumped all the 'HD-ready' countries together in region 1. High-def penetration in Europe is minuscule, so I don't think we'll get any titles for a long time.

Additionally, region protection will apparently be much more difficult to remove on Blu-ray than on DVD. As a European who buys a lot of titles overseas, this sucks. I was hoping to buy some HD titles from amazon and similar sources.