Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2013 August 24

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August 24

On region-locked Blu-ray movies and the Sony PlayStation 4.

Hello all,

I have been informed of the news that the PlayStation 4 will not be region-locked, meaning that games from a foreign region will work on your respective local console (i.e. me playing the U.K. edition of FIFA 14 on my North American PS4). My question is, since these games are on Blu-ray discs, will I be able to watch Blu-ray movies from other regions on my PS4? Thanks! Nicholasprado (talk) 07:05, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it - games only. Region-locking is very important to the movie industry and I can't see Sony making the PS4 completely regionless though before you know it there'll be ps4 homebrew and that problem will be fixed. ;) --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 19:44, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I haven't seen any official line on this, but I see no reason to suppose anything will have changed in that regard from PS3. Games are region-free, but not movies. AJCham 19:46, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

When a company wants to make a device that plays a DVD or Blu-ray, they enter into a comprehensive set of legal agreements with the licencing consortium. From that they get the rights to use the suite of patents that cover the product, the right to use the trademark DVD/Blu-Ray logos, and their own device cryptographic key which allows them to decrypt the encrypted media streams on the disks. Part of the contract they have to agree in order to get all that is an agreement to limit how their player works - they agree to honour the region coding (and other stuff like unskippable and unpausable flags on streams). So any player from any mainstream manufacturer will always follow region coding (some have an "operator mode" which allows that feature to be switched off, or the home region changed, but the DVD consortium have been clamping down on that kind of thing in recent years). Bar some grey-ish Chinese players, the only players of DVDs or Blu-Rays you'll find that ignore region coding are things like VLC, which haven't signed the licening suite (and thus had to break the cryptography, and aren't paying to licence the MPEG/BluRay patent suite). 146.90.159.220 (talk) 13:41, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Magic school bus subtitles

Who knows where I can get the subtitles to Magic school bus cartoon for episode 2 season 4. Cracks a yolk. I want to make it for someone special who loves the cartoon. Please help. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.215.119.10 (talk) 07:51, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

If you mean The Magic School Bus (TV series), then it's out on DVD. I'm sure that will contain the subtitles. Rojomoke (talk) 09:13, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

I would assume so as well, though the details at Amazon don't say so. The reviewers mentioned that there are audio tracks for English and Spanish, though, so it seems likely that there'd be a subtitle track. Matt Deres (talk) 02:00, 25 August 2013 (UTC) update: the details at Amazon for the episode in question also don't mention subtitles. Matt Deres (talk) 02:03, 25 August 2013 (UTC)