A pleasant surprise

While on a recent trip to Toronto I managed to snag a certain DVD of a certain Stanley Cup Championship winning team. That being, of course, our very own Anaheim Ducks and their 2007 victory over the Senators. Picked it up in an HMV store, although I didn't look to see if they had the Special Edition available in the Hockey Hall of Fame, should've in hindsight, but I'll live. Let's get down to business.

"Wait, why did you bother buying that? You know very well that won't work in your country!" Is what you were probably thinking. Yeah, region coding is a pain. You can't just buy a DVD from another country and expect it to work when you get home. Stupid pointless laws that make consumers angry and increase piracy and... um, yeah. Back to this:

Despite being completely aware of the region coding issues that I would inevitably have with this purchase, as a Ducks fan I simply had to have it, even as a collector's item, plus I was sure there'd be some way I could watch it despite it being a Region 1 and not a Region 2 disk. I'd been after this for some time and there was no way I was just going to leave it there. That and this kind of product simply doesn't exist outside of North America, except when you see it on eBay or Amazon because somebody couldn't get it to work and is getting rid of it.

So, first thing I did with this was to stick it in the PS3, and pray and hope that it would work...

...To no avail. Screw you, region coding.

But this wasn't my only option. Yeah, multi-region DVD players do exist but I don't personally own one. However what was interesting to learn is that the cheapo DVD players you can pick up in supermarkets for about £15-20 may play disks from other regions as the manufacturers sometimes don't bother to program region coding into it. As it turns out, we had one of these downstairs, so I stuck this disk in the player, and...

It worked! So now as long as we have this cheapo DVD player around, I can watch this thing as often as I like. I'd talk more about it but this is pretty much what you'd expect, narrating the Ducks 2006-07 campaign (with some 2005-06 backstory thrown in there, which was nice to see), player interviews, and things like that. The coverage is quite extensive and makes for a good way to spend a couple of hours. Needless to say it's really cool to own.

Side note: Is it ironic that Warner Bros. produced this DVD, while the team featured used to be owned by Disney?