Short Post: DVD Region Encoding Can Kiss My…
Here’s a little story about the power of online community to solve simple problems.
My daughter turned six earlier this month to much fanfare. A late arrival present came from our British friends, complete with a pair of fairy dolls with matching DVD. We opened the box this morning and popped the DVD into our machine to no avail. The U.K. is a different region, and they have PAL-formatted disks and tapes.
Back in the day when I had a huge Shakespeare collection that included lots of video, this was a frequent problem and I knew the (I’m only slightly kidding here) back alley places where I could get things transferred on the cheap… but that was in the pre-DVD days.
It galls me that if our British friends send a DVD my daughter can’t watch it.
A few minutes patient Googling on “DVD Region Encoding change” led me to this post by Alex Barnett as well as this post by Andy Budd as well.
Per their suggestions, I downloaded the free VideoLAN software and had my daughter up and running on my desktop computer in minutes. It’s actually a half-DVD, half videogame so it’s a better experience for her to use the big desktop, although that relegates me to the laptop if I want to do anything.
The lesson for the DVD folks? Enough with the regional encoding already. You’ve already lost this battle.
One Response to “Short Post: DVD Region Encoding Can Kiss My…”
1 Jonathan Rhys-Lewis 23 July 2007 @ 8:46 am
Hi, Did you know that most domestic DVD players are multi region anyway, but for various reasons they put the region encoding on there. However, its usually a simple case of pressing a few buttons on the remote control of your dvd player to make it play ANY region movies.
Theres lots of sites with databases of these codes for various machine, probably the best and oldest site is http://www.dvdhacks.co.uk and its all free and legal
J.
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