The other night, as I was fumbling for cash in my apartment doorway, the delivery guy from my local Thai restaurant took it upon himself to give me a little crap about my choice of DVD players.

That Chinese player is no good, he told me with a look of disgust, nodding at an unopened box that was sitting on a little bench in my entranceway. He asked why I bought that one.

Yes, it was true. I couldn't deny it. I'd actually purchased an entry-level, Chinese-made Apex DVD player, a unit that would be scoffed at by any videophile, real or self-proclaimed. But what my snobby delivery dude didn't know was that he was looking at one very special DVD player and a hot-ticket item these days on eBay: the discontinued Apex AD-1500 with a serial number that starts with A,B,C, or D.

I bought it, I said, because I am writing a story about an interesting feature it offers.

When I told him that the interesting feature was that you could easily remove the copy-protection scheme and regional-encoding features, he raised an eyebrow and glanced at the box, suddenly more impressed.

OK, I understand, he said, and took my money.

Is that kosher?
Naturally, companies aren't supposed to build DVD players that allow you to remove copy-protection schemes, otherwise known as Macrovision. It's illegal, and it would allow you to easily copy DVDs to videocassette via a VCR or to DVD via a standalone DVD recorder, such as the Panasonic DMR-E20, the Philips DVDR1000 or the Pioneer DVR-7000. (See the May 28 issue of Fully Equipped for more information about DVD recorders.) With the right equipment, you could also transfer the video to your computer and make copies from there.

But over the years, a few Macrovision-free models have slipped out onto the market. It all started back in 2000 with Apex's AD-600A, a player that had a hidden, or loophole, menu that could be accessed by a series of button pushes on the remote, sort of like a cheat code in a video game. At the bottom of the loophole menu was a warning, "You should not be here," which could be the title of the hackers' anthem.

A fellow over at Nerdout.com somehow discovered the code and posted his findings on his Web site, and Apex got a ton of publicity. It promptly removed the hidden-menu version of the AD-600A from circulation. To be fair, Apex, which is actually based in California and simply imports its players from China, says it didn't know the loophole menu was there; only the manufacturer of the player did. Luckily for the company, the manufacturer in China was liable, not Apex.

Déjà vu all over again
The story with the newer Apex AD-1500, which plays just about every known format and goes for about $100 on eBay, is slightly different, but the results are the same. This model, like a few of Apex's other models, has upgradable firmware. Instead of cracking a code for a hidden menu, someone wrote a program--the upgrade CD is sold on eBay for a few bucks--that automatically upgrades the firmware and removes all copy protection and regional encoding, making the player Macrovision- and region-free in a matter of seconds.

What did Apex have to say about all this? Well, Colton Manley, the company's director of PR, said he was unaware of the AD-1500's removable-copy-protection issues and didn't know that it was being advertised as a Macrovision-free player on eBay. (About 15 are on sale as I write this.) He did say that the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) would certainly have a problem with it and that it would probably contact both Apex and eBay. He reiterated, however, that Apex was a marketing company, a successful one that has sold hundreds of thousands of DVD players and was not liable for such loopholes.

"We buy our stuff from a few different manufacturers in China," Manley said. "There were three different versions of the 600A. Only 6,000 to 7,000 units had the hidden menu. When we found out about it, we stopped using that chip manufacturer."

Is copying worth it?
Put aside for a moment that duping copy-protected DVDs is illegal. Is it really worth it, and how concerned should the MPAA be with the few thousand folks who are buying AD-1500s online?

Well, first you have to remember that even if you were to couple the AD-1500 with a DVD recorder, you wouldn't get a perfect copy of a DVD. For the purpose of this discussion, let's say we're duping a noncopy-protected DVD. Using Panasonic's DMR-E20, for example, you won't get surround sound, only stereo, and you can't insert chapters if you're recording to DVD-R media. (You can if you're recording to DVD-RW, but it's a pain.) Also, the recorder's high-quality mode--a notch down from its best-quality mode--allows you to record only two hours' worth of material on a disc, which means you're limited to copying movies that are shorter than two hours. On top of that, the media are still fairly expensive; about $4 to $5 per blank disc. In other words, at this point, it's better to just buy the DVD, which comes in a nice case with all the right artwork.

That said, you would end up with a very high-quality recording that looks much better than a videocassette recording. (Why anybody would want to record a DVD to videocassette is beyond me.) But those who are serious about duplication--and breaking the law--will remove the Macrovision and transfer the movie to a hard drive, then burn it to disc using a DVD burner. That method, which requires a little more tech know-how, will result in perfect copies. The bottom line: If I were the MPAA, I'd be more worried about those guys, the counterfeiters who are buying hundreds if not thousands of blank discs and pumping out copies of say, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and selling them on the streets.