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Whats the deal with Apex? |
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Plenty of users have been requesting information about Apex Digital, specifically since eBay decided to withdraw all auctions for this company. Well Apex are a manufacturer of dvd players and are based in Walnut, California. As a budget manufacturer it's surprising that anyone in the UK would have any interest in this company. This was exactly the case until someone discovered a hidden function in Apex's menu system to circumvent copy protection lockout of regional codes. The regional lockout code has been created by Macrovision in conjunction with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These features were only available on one Apex model (AD-600A) , and it appears to have been an honest oversight by Apex. Once they had been informed of the Macrovision copy prevention circumvention they discontinued the model in question. Apex laid the blame at the door of the Chinese manufacturer who they had subcontracted to make the dvd players. Apex believe that only 6,000 to 7,000 units shipped had the hidden menu. Apex spokesman said. "I have to side with Macrovision, because they are trying to put a stop to people from illegally using them,"
The interest generated by this story sent Hackers and modders scrambling to take advantage of the easy to remove copy-protection and regional-encoding features. Subsequently instructions have appeared on the web for how to remove regional-encoding and copy protection features on a range of Apex players (such as Apex AD-1500 with serial number A,B,C,D). They did this by replacing the device's firmware with a hacked version. Instructions can be found here http://www.nerd-out.com/, for those of you eager to discover more. However is it worth the effort? What would be the result if you hooked an AD-600A upto a DVD recorder and decided to dupe a non-copy protected DVD? We have been reliable informed that the duped DVD would only contain stereo sound and not Dolby surround and that chapter insertion is extremely problematic. There is also a two hour time limit for duped material, making it impossible to dupe films longer than two hours. ----------------------------------------------- Related Articles
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Model version
AD-600A 
Model version AD-1500