A month ago, I bought Kung Fu Hustle for $20 from some Asian DVD website. When it arrived, I discovered that it was of a region not compatible with my Region-1 player.

IN THEORY, I could do the following to make a region-free copy:

1) Update my computer’s DVD-ROM drive firmware to a region-free version
2) Download and install DVD Region Killer
3) Use DVD Decrypter to rip the DVD onto my harddisk
4) Use DVD Shrink to get the movie onto one DVD+/-R disc (re-author, if necessary).

Really, steps 1 and 2 are optional, but doing them makes it so DVD Decrypter doesn’t have to switch to brute force mode.

As it turns out, Kung Fu Hustle doesn’t have to be recompressed to fit on a DVD if the menus, extra language tracks, and extra captions are removed.

There are probably roughly a million other ways to do this, but that’s how I would do it. In theory, of course. In theory, I also might opt to use other recompression software to get better results, but these days, I just want things to work easily.