Hi,

As many of you know, I have both PAL and NTSC DVDS in my collection. I can play them all perfectly, with no problems.

However in America, there is a vicious rumour that your dvd players will not play our PAL dvds.

But how many people have actually had problems playing PAL dvds on there dvd players? I've done over 200 trades, and only two poeple have had problems. But the rumour of it, has caused far more damage to trading than the actual problem itself.

Anyway, Please let me know if you can play them or not. So we can start a Poll on how serious this problem actually is.

KU7UK

I own 4 dvd players (standlone), and 3 of them play PAL dvds just fine - one does not. It's only states "Error with Media".

My experience is that the cheap players, like Apex and others, are the great for playing PAL dvds in the U.S.

Kevin

I got an Apex dvd player from ebay and it plays ANY region dvd in the world...it was about 80.00 but you have to make sure you read the auctions carefully because the current Apex models have this function disabled - it is only certain models that allow you to play all region, and those usually have to be modified to do so (many sellers on ebay sell the unit already modified and ready to play!)

The BEST thing about the Apex all region dvd player I got is that it is the only dvd player that ALSO gets rid of macrovision - so I can connect it directly to my dvd recorder and make an exact copy of ANY dvd.

Ialso think most regions will play in any computer dvd drive - I know region "0" and PAL typically do...

None of my DVD players can play PAL:

2 Panasonic DVD players
2 Panasonic DVD recorders
Mintek
Power DVD

Whenever I'm considering a new DVD player, I check http://www.vcdhelp.com to find out if the player has an easy hack to make it region-free. Of my five players, two are region-free and can play PAL with no problem (a Daewoo and a Phillips, both of which use a sequence of buttons on the remote control to remove region sensitivity - the Daewoo is also Macrovision free). My Toshiba can play PAL if there's no region encoding (i.e., region 0 or any burned discs). I can't remember if my Panasonics can play region 0 PAL or not.

Different players play PAL better than others. Some truncate the picture, or do a color shift, etc.

JVC is notoriously hard to hack - generally speaking, a chip hack is required, which can be expensive and will void warrantee. Sony can be tough, too, as is Panasonic. My understanding is that Cyberhome is region-free out of the box, but it's not advertised.

I think the reason we have these stupid regions is to protect the interests of the studios/distributors. If there's no agreement in place in a country for their product (filim, television, whatever), they don't want easy access to their stuff there. It's copyright protection and there's money involved.

Fans have been bypassing the regions in increasing numbers since the regions were put in place (applying to DVD only). Sales are actually higher than expected, to the point that last year, the BBC posted an article positing the elimination of region encoding because it's proving to be not economically beneficial.

Oh, and if you use your computer to play DVDs, you can alter the region setting a couple of times before it becomes permanent. I found a piece of software that removes the restriction and improves playback, DVD RegionFree (http://www.dvdidle.com).

Eliminating the region barrier really opens up trading possibilities.

As long as the DVD is region 0 it plays fine for me. But other regions don't play on my GoVideo players. I did find a hack for one so that will play all regions, but the other didn't have a hack listed. Are there any other sites that list hacks to make dvd players region free or just that one?

I really hate the region coding - in my opinion its a total waste of time and prohibits sales. Some films are only available on region 2 DVDs so by enforcing that region the studio is losing out on sales in other countries. Stupid in my opinion.

There are other sites, yes. I use that one, but if you try Googling "GoVideo" with "region hack" you should get some hits you can review to see if you can find something that works for you. Sometimes a remote hack on one model will work on another model of the same brand.

Thanks for the search tip, will see if I can find anything. My dvd recorder isn't usually on the hack lists, though I haven't tried one of the hacks for a different model on it.

Does anyone know of a hack to make PowerDVD regionless? It switches from one region to another only 4 times before staying with the last used region.

Any PC-based DVD software is likely using the operating system's restriction on region switching. Once it locks, if you use another DVD software, it's still locked. DVD Region-Free is a software I use on my laptop to overcome that. It's available (for a fee, of course, but not too bad) from www.dvdidle.com (http://www.dvdidle.com). I don't recommend their companion product DVDIdle, though.