Checking Region Codes (Windows CE 5.0)

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Before playing a title, your DVD-Video player application must perform its own explicit region check to determine whether it is allowed to play the title at all.

To check region codes

  1. Send an IOCTL_DVD_GET_REGION call to the ATAPI driver to retrieve the region codes for both the DVD drive and the DVD-Video disc.

  2. If the DVD drive only conforms to the RPCI standard, instead of RPCII, the drive will not maintain a system region setting. The IOCTL call will report this and the application will need to implement a hardware-specific method of retrieving the region code, or it will need to maintain its own setting.

    For most embedded devices, the player application is created for the specific hardware on the device. Because the hardware is known at design time and never changes over the life of the device, it is generally not necessary to implement a way to determine whether a drive conforms to RPCI or RPCII.

  3. Check for a match between the disc region and the system region; only proceed with playback if the regions match. If the regions do not match, your player application must notify the user that the disc cannot be played.

This technique for checking region codes is demonstrated in the DVDSample code sample. For more information, see DVD-Video API Samples.

See Also

Adding More Player Capabilities

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