Region Coded Dvd's

[Anonymous]

What do people think of the region system on dvds? they dont have it for blu rays, you can play any in any blu ray device but dvds can only play in their respective country of origin or can they play in others?

back in 2006 when the film Superman Returns was released they called it the year of Superman & all throughout the year they released every bit of superman/boy/girl, material on dvd & blu ray. I was particularly annoyed because i really wanted the Superboy season 1 set but they said that it would never be released in europe or the old b/w serials from 1948/50 but a few months ago i discovered that you can play imports on ps3, so i ordered the 2 aforementioned sets plus the long awaited release of Superboy season 2 to dvd & it works brilliant & looks great

roll on Man Of Steel & hopefully a release of Superboy seasons 3 & 4 that i will import

[Anonymous]

Guys

First off, all Japanese DVD players are manufactured as multi-regional players, they don't make special players for different parts of the world. When DVD players arrive from Japan they are encoded to region 2 in the UK before being distributed to retailers.

Therefore, there is no need to hunt and pay extra for multi-regional DVD players, which is basically a con or (if you think of it more kindly) paying someone to break the encoding and reverting the machine back to it's native multi-regional state.

OK, that said, it is relatively easy to find the instructions on the Internet (in various forums) on  how to break the enforced region 2 coding and make your player capable of playing any DVD disk made for regions 1 - 6.

I personally like Toshiba DVD players and over the years bought three of them, the last one I bought was sold in a Tesco supermarket and literally cost pocket change (less than £25).

Not only that, the manual also said that it could play DVD disks from any region but, of course, it was crippled to region 2 only.  So I got on the Internet, found the necessary restriction breaking code and from then on I was able play any DVD disk bought from or made for anywhere in the world.

Consequently, buying a normal (cheap as chips) DVD player and converting it back into it's normal multi-regional state is not difficult and should not be a problem for anyone.

UK Bob

[sheepdog]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Heard of handbrake, 500+ dedicated guy

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Fortunately, I scripted the entire lot in bash as Handbrake provides a command line option! Well the iso to mp4 conversion part anyway with a relatively high success rate. 

[sheepdog]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Guys

First off, all Japanese DVD players are manufactured as multi-regional players, they don't make special players for different parts of the world. When DVD players arrive from Japan they are encoded to region 2 in the UK before being distributed to retailers.

Therefore, there is no need to hunt and pay extra for multi-regional DVD players, which is basically a con or (if you think of it more kindly) paying someone to break the encoding and reverting the machine back to it's native multi-regional state.

OK, that said, it is relatively easy to find the instructions on the Internet (in various forums) on  how to break the enforced region 2 coding and make your player capable of playing any DVD disk made for regions 1 - 6.

I personally like Toshiba DVD players and over the years bought three of them, the last one I bought was sold in a Tesco supermarket and literally cost pocket change (less than £25).

Not only that, the manual also said that it could play DVD disks from any region but, of course, it was crippled to region 2 only.  So I got on the Internet, found the necessary restriction breaking code and from then on I was able play any DVD disk bought from or made for anywhere in the world.

Consequently, buying a normal (cheap as chips) DVD player and converting it back into it's normal multi-regional state is not difficult and should not be a problem for anyone.

UK Bob

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Not quite - some Panasonics (we have one) are factory locked to Region 2 so unless you pay for the region-free chip change, its unchangeable. 

[Bambino]

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/dvd-unlock

[Anonymous]

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@sheepdog wrote:

 

Not quite - some Panasonics (we have one) are factory locked to Region 2 so unless you pay for the region-free chip change, its unchangeable. 

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I had to hire a service remote to unlock my region 2 Panasonic to region free, it was about £25.

[Anonymous]

some tesco cheap players could play them, think it was technika or toshiba

[Anonymous]

Hi Sheepdog

As you can imagine, I was surprised that you said some Panasonic DVD players are locked into region 2, if that is the case then why would you buy such a machine.

I am sure you know, just like I do, that some US films are not released in the UK while others have extra editing cuts made to them, eg: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, because our film censors believe we are too namby-pamby to watch a bit horror in our films.

Its just that I believe buying a crippled DVD player is a retrograde step.

UK Bob