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ronin1
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| Joined: | Saturday January 21st, 2006 |
| Location: | S.F. Bay Area, California USA |
| Posts: | 622 |
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Posted: Thursday February 22nd, 2007 01:28 am |
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How to play your Russian Woman’s DVDs,
The low cost and hi-fidelity of DVDs have created a boom in sales of all venues of video products. A DVD collection and player are nearly as ubiquitous as the TV itself.
Still, despite this bonanza for DVD marketers, it is not enough. Essentially all DVDs are manufactured with coding that restricts it from being played in other geographical areas (or that is the intent). This is carried out by with the help of the manufacturers of DVD players. Manufacturers have agreed to code their players in concert with the coding on DVDs that are sold within defined geographic regions as outlined below:
REGION 1 - USA, Canada
REGION 2 - Japan, Europe, South Africa, Middle East, Greenland
REGION 3 - S.Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Parts of South East Asia
REGION 4 - Australia, New Zealand, Latin America (including Mexico)
REGION 5 - Eastern Europe, Russia, India, Africa
REGION 6 - China
REGION 7 - Reserved for Unspecified Special Use
REGION 8 - Reserved for Ships, Airlines, etc.
REGION 0 or REGION ALL -- Discs are uncoded & can be played worldwide. The caveat is that PAL DVDs must be played in a PAL-compatible unist and NTSC DVDs must be played in an NTSC-compatible units.
So when your Russian woman brings her beloved set of Russian DVDs to your homeland, don’t be caught in not meeting her expectations. When she pops her Russian (code 5) DVD into your DVD player (code 1 or 2) all she will see is a blank screen. You can expect anything from tears to fits of rage.
How to remedy the situation before it happens? First, there is little that can be done with the DVD itself; however the DVD player has some possibilities. The DVD manufacturers wisely decided that making uniquely different players for each region would go against the law of ‘economies of scale’. Thus, most manufacturers have opted to have the same hardware for all regions and just program the players differently. Reprogramming a DVD may sound difficult, but for many DVD players it can be as simple as pressing a secret sequence of buttons on your remote. Some require downloading code from your computer and burning a CD that needs to be installed and uploaded onto the DVD’s flash memory. Though these ‘tricks’ are suppose to be kept from prying eyes, you can’t keep something like this a secret for long. There are sites that can give you ‘hacks’ to change the region coding on just about every DVD prayer ever made. One such site is Videohelp.
If you are brave enough to try flashing new code into your DVD player, take care to read the instructions and all comments until it is perfectly clear. You will only have one shot at it. If you do it wrong or load the wrong code, you may have an expensive paper weight.
RoninLast edited on Saturday February 24th, 2007 02:28 am by ronin1
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ronin1
Administrator
| Joined: | Saturday January 21st, 2006 |
| Location: | S.F. Bay Area, California USA |
| Posts: | 622 |
| Visits: | 7 | | Currently: | married |
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Posted: Saturday February 24th, 2007 02:32 am |
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So you have managed to change your DVD player to ‘Region 0’. Kudos to you, but you’re not out of the woods yet of you live in the US.
The other difference in Russian DVDs is that it may have been filmed and/or formatted to PAL standards. PAL format has a higher vertical resolution than our standard (NTSC). This means that when you have overcome the regional code problem, you will be faced with a vertical display scaling problem that is not acceptable for viewing.
The PAL scaling problem is not a trivial difficulty. The only way to solve this is through hard cash in buying hardware. The typical solution is to buy a new DVD player. For the US you will be looking for a player with the following features:
- Region 0 coding. (to be able to play a DVD from any region)
- NTSC DVD compatible. (to be able to read DVDs with NTSC formats properly)
- PAL DVD compatible. (to be able to read DVDs with PAL formats properly)
- NTSC output video converter. (To be able to convert PAL formats to NTSC output format. Most converters provide outputs for both NTSC and PAL TVs.)
Unfortunately, as stated above, you just can’t go to your local electronics store to pick up one of these bad boys. All brick and mortar outlets will not sell such coveted goods. You will have resort to ordering by mail or through the internet. Such sites as SamStores.com (not to be confused with Sams Club) is a good resource for ordering. To date, all their produces are set to region ‘0’. Just make sure you select one that is NTSC & PAL compatible and has an NTSC converter. Such players can be had for as low as $50. The link should take you directly to all the DVD players that have all 4 mentioned features.
Now you are set. You can play every DVD under the sun… almost. Now, the DVD marketers are coming out with ways to block the region ‘0’ code. On a few selected DVDs (they don’t tell which ones) they have a new coding called Region Code Enhanced (RCE) that requires exact region matching. Fortunately, that is unlikely to affect Russian made DVDs for a long time.
Now you can sit back and watch your RW enjoy her movies and blow some steam as she gets engrossed in her favorite actors and plots… see familiar sights and sounds. There is one draw back to doing all this before hand. She will not appreciate the difficulties that you had to go through in making DVD viewing so easy for her. In this she may take it for granted that your video system always was able to perform this feat.
Ronin Last edited on Saturday February 24th, 2007 02:32 am by ronin1
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