May 27, 2005
dvd hell
To all my hacker friends:
My dear mother came back from a trip to the US last week.
She brought back all these new DVDs.
Oh Dear! They don’t seem to work in the UK. Some kind of baked-in market protectionism, no doubt.
Can anyone steer me in the right direction for possibly fixing this problem? Can a DVD player be reconfigured, or something?
Or is the problem unfixable, and DVD makers just plain evil?
Any help on this would be really appreciated. Thanks.
You need to region-free your DVD player http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks
Yeah, Pete B is right Hugh.
The world is split in different DVD Regions. Why? Simply because one should not be able to view a film that have been released on DVD in USA, while it’s still playing in your local theathers. While USA is region 1, UK (and Europe)is Region 2. So better find a way to make your player Region free, that’s the fastest way anyways
More about what I’m babbling about here:
http://hometheaterinfo.com/dvd3.htm
Have a nice day!
Richer Sounds have a multi region player at
I don’t have a regular stand-alone DVD player, so I tend to watch things on my Mac using VLC, which doesn’t care about regions. (Windows and Linux versions are out there too — videolan.org)
If I needed to de-region a disk, I’d use “Mac the Ripper” to strip out the contents and re-burn it without regions or macrovision.
The region coding thing is a pain in the &^%*. Please indulge our collective frustration with this by creating the art to accompany our angst.
Oh, and yes, they are evil.
They could be playable on a computer though the CD drive on my powerbook warns that while it will recognise the various different territory formats, it will ultimately freeze on the fifth format I choose to play and therefater be a single format player. great!!
Your local HIFI store where you bought the DVD player has a service remote. It typically takes 3 – 4 sec to switch of the region codes.
stw
Here’s a perfect example of why crap like this goes largely unchecked. You’re a perfectly smart guy, and tech-savvy enough to write a blog, yet this problem is so subtle that you haven’t encountered it before.
I think people don’t complain about this or boycott because they generally just don’t encounter it.
Anyway, supposedly in Europe you can get nice, regionless players for cheap. I’ve not been there so I can’t tell you more than that, but that’s what you want — a regionless player.
You can purchase a regionless player, an expense nobody wants to do if they already have a player, no matter how cheap another one would be. OR, you can render your region player region free with various ‘hacks’ you enter with the remote control, depending on the brand. Sony players or Playstations generally require an addition chip be installed, i.e. soldering. Most hacks also remove the macrovision that won’t allow you to record from dvd to vhs.
http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks.php
If you have a DVD burner, you can copy the DVDs. When you burn the new DVDs, the programs will throw away the region info. I know that there are several Windows programs out there, but I only have experience with DVD Shrink which works fine for my purposes. Better yet, have a geek friend do it for you.
Yep, giant pain.
If you have a higher-end player it’s probably best to have a professional unlock it (region-free it).
There are a million hacks, software and hardware, but unless you have a Serious Home Theatre you should probably just get a nice Asian region-free play-anything type player.
A friend of mine has one that cost him about 50 Euros and plays all DVDs plus a bunch of digital formats that are interesting if you’re into esoteric films, which you can sometimes only get as video CDs (VCD/SVCD) or pirate copies (usually DivX).
It works fine with his ordinary TV and ordinary stereo, and he didn’t have to hack anything.
If the region encoding caught you off guard in the first place, you probably don’t want to deal with hacking your way around it.
Here are a couple of answers to your questions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD#Region_codes
http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2004/11/17/will_american_dvds_play_in_a_dvd_player_in_england.html
http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2005/02/07/what_are_region_0_dvds.html
What is DVD Region Killer?
DVD Region Killer is a Software, that enables you to play DVD titles made for different regions on your PC, without the hassle to switch the region of your Windows operating system and / or the region of your DVD player software back and forth.
As you probably know, a DVD is usually mastered to play in a specific region of the world. The world is divided into 6 regions, for example USA is region 1, and Europe is region 2. A DVD mastered to play in the US (region 1) will not be played on a DVD player set to region 2 (Europe).
There are many reasons why the DVD Industry has set up this region restriction, but there are various reasons to overcome this restriction, too. For example, a lot of people are offended by “forced subtitles”, when they prefer to watch a movie in their original language, just to name one.
This software is offered “free of charge”, but the copyright remains by Elaborate Bytes, Oliver Kastl.
If you love this software, I would appreciate a small donation to keep the DVD Region Killer development going. Details will follow