[NTLUG:Discuss] OT: are CD by region

[Ralph Green]

On Sun, 2009-10-11 at 20:30 -0500, Daniel Hauck wrote:
> (2009年10月11日 18:23), Fred James wrote:
> > All
> > Please pardon the OT question, but I don't know who to ask:
> >     I know that DVDs are distributed by region and will not play on 
> > equipment from a different region
> >     How about audio CDs?  Same issue?
> > Thank you in advance for any help you may be able to offer
> > Regards
> > Fred James
> >   
> 
> Short and simple. No.
> 
> Audio CDs are not encrypted and not encoded. They are raw bits arranged
Ok, and a slightly longer answer.  The standard for audio CDs is called
the Red Book(guess why).  It does not allow anything like region
encoding or auto installed software.  In order for a CD to be labeled as
an audio CD(Compact Disc Digital Audio), it has to follow the Red Book
standard.  Philips seems to enforce this pretty well.  The catch is that
as I look at my later CDs, they don't all have that symbol that used to
be on all audio CDs.  If your CD has the symbol, you can be pretty safe
that it will play on all working CD players.  If you don't have it, then
good luck, because it may or may not.

> in tracks. If it works on some but not all CD players, I would suspect a
> broken format CD. I recall some put out by Sony BMG that would install a
  There are several "protected" CD derivatives that do odd things.  Sony
got in trouble because of a couple of things about their protections.
But, people besides Sony have produced things that looked like audio
CDs, but were not.


> rootkit onto your Windows computer but would otherwise refuse to play on
One funny thing about those Sony CDs was that they played just fine and
caused no problem on Linux systems.  They only rootkitted Windows
computers.  Maybe Mac, but I don't remember about that.