UK Anime Distributor Anime Limited Discussion Thread

As WMD said it's probably Royal Mail been backed up still from the Christmas period. Last year was our first year where we celebrated during a pandemic so the demand for mail in presents is probably unprecedented and it's always a busy period for them on normal years as well.
 
Oldmario said:
FMP which was shipped from the same place took i think 4-5 days so i guess we'll have to get used to this new place being slower than next day delivery like we've had from MVM
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I was talking about the Weathering With You Zavvi copy though, which would be a different fulfilment house. I think.
 
Excitingly my last two orders have shipped! Both of them were awaiting stock so it looks like they’ve maybe gotten reprints
 
Okay, so after the whole thing about the Weathering with You 4K disc being region locked in the US I got curious about the UK disc. I have a region free player for standard BDs but my 4K player is solely region B (outside of 4K discs normally.) So when my set arrived I thought that I had no way to verify the discs region settings. I do have a drive in my PC but was always under the impression it was a standard one, not 4K compatible, as it normally doesn’t read them. But as it turns out with a downgrade of the firmware, voila, it can read 4K discs no problem. To cut what’s becoming a long story short, I looked at the disc on my PC and can confirm there’s no region lock on the UK 4K disc. Obviously, all the other discs in the set are B locked.

I’m really curious as to how the US disc would be region locked. Especially as Justin Sevakis mentioned when someone asked him on Twitter, a 4K disc with region locking wouldn’t pass certification. A strange situation indeed.

I can provide some screenshots and further explanation of how I checked if anyone is at all interested about this!
 
RebelNotorious said:
I can provide some screenshots and further explanation of how I checked if anyone is at all interested about this!
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Consider me interested :)
Honestly I find the whole situation quite puzzling. The most logical explanation seems to be that the US 4k discs don't check the region, but the country code (similar to what Sentai does with their "geo-locking" on BDs). You would assume that Japan required them to do that to avoid reverse importation. But realistically you'd then expect it on all 4k releases. I sort of want to get my hands on the US release to investigate it further, but the price is a bit steep just for a curiosity.
 
IdiomaticLynx said:
Consider me interested :)
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Using DVDFab, I opened the disc's info window which gives a rundown of the info the software recieves, disc type, title, region coding, other protections, that sort of stuff.

On the standard disc it looks like this:
2021-01-08 00_18_25-Information.png
You can see that it shows "Region Code is removed. (Region B, Region Mask '_B')" since when you back up a disc with DVDFab it removes any region locking by default. (I typically keep back ups of all my region A stuff just on the off chance my region free player bites the dust, in case anyone is wondering why I have DVDFab lol)

The 4K disc on the otherhand, looks like this:
2021-01-08 00_14_18-Information.png
There's no region info to be found or removed.

I wish I had the US disc to run a comparison and while I have a handful of American friends, none of them have purchased the 4K set. That's not to say that something like geo-locking would show up on DVDFab as I don't believe I own any discs confirmed to have it present.

IdiomaticLynx said:
The most logical explanation seems to be that the US 4k discs don't check the region, but the country code (similar to what Sentai does with their "geo-locking" on BDs).
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This is an interesting point that I hadn't considered and I haven't seen brought up in discussion about it yet, it is a logical explanation but like region locking, I'm not sure geo-locking or reading country codes is allowed within the UHD disc specification since they're primarly designed to be without locking of sorts. We've slowly progressed towards this over the years, DVD featured 6 commonly used regions (10 in total if you include 0, ALL and 7 and 8 which were used only in very specific cases,) to blu-ray which featured only 3 (but of course, featured other methods to almost double lock a disc) and now UHD has none, ideally I'd like it to stay that way lol.

Given how unprecedented the situation is, I'm surprised that GKIDS/Shout Factory! haven't given some kind of statement regarding why this has happened.
 
RebelNotorious said:
I'm not sure geo-locking or reading country codes is allowed within the UHD disc specification since they're primarly designed to be without locking of sorts. We've slowly progressed towards this over the years, DVD featured 6 commonly used regions (10 in total if you include 0, ALL and 7 and 8 which were used only in very specific cases,) to blu-ray which featured only 3 (but of course, featured other methods to almost double lock a disc) and now UHD has none, ideally I'd like it to stay that way lol.
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As far as I know the country code register doesn't exist for region or geo-locking purposes. And while I have no idea what the certification process entails and whether or not it's fully automated or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if accessing the country code register wouldn't raise any alarms.

Anyway, it seems that the UK release isn't plagued with this, so looking forward to receiving my copy. Just hoping that it doesn't get damaged in transit.
 
Or that you don’t get hit with custom charges like I did :) one consolation I have is that my copy arrived in absolute perfect condition.

Where did you order your copy from?
 
IdiomaticLynx said:
Zavvi.nl as it worked out slightly cheaper compared to zavvi.com at the time. But I do hope it slips through customs, but even if it doesn't, as long as it's in perfect condition.
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Considering the EU sites say that even if shipped from the UK all local tax is already paid you should be fine as you ordered from the Dutch site.

The issue would probably arise if you ordered from the UK side.
 
I did order on first dec. and still no update.
How long does a reprint take?
I have 4 Products on Awaiting reprint and they do not ship my other products because of that.
So I don't even get my pre orders on time and I thought they ship separately.

I can not cancel those 4 products, because they cancel the whole order.

And yeah the vat will **** me hard now, becauae I live in the EU. To pay vat for 2 countries is ****** up. Did somone got a order dispatch for EU in January? If yes how did AL deal with the british vat for you guys?
 
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