On Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:50:09 -0800, DVD from Europe? Region change?
<DVD from Europe? Region change?[ at ]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
[Quoted Text] >My uncle sent me a movie on a DVD from Europe,when I wanted to start watching
>it,a window came up which said i'm in region 1,and that i have to change it
>to region 2.Right after that a window with '' Windows Media Player cannot
>play the DVD because the disc prohibits playback in your region of the world.
>You must obtain a disc that is intended for your geographic region.'' comes
>up.
>So i changed my location to a country in europe but it still didnt work.
>What should I do now?
>Is there any other possibility to watch the movie? (It doesnt work on my dvd
>player which is connected to the tv,cause the dvd player doesnt support the
>PAL format)
>Thank you very much for your help
OK here's the deal : DVDs are regionalised to protect the movie
studios revenue streams (different release dates in different
countries).
The DVD drive (hardware) has a region associated with it - usually
it's not set, and on first play, will end up as your current region,
for example Region 1 (USA/Canada)
Disks won't play if the DVD hardware region doesn't match the region
on the disk. That's separate from any regional settings in windows -
it's hardware (actually firmware) setting. It can only be changed
somewhere between 3-5 times, then the DVD disk drive is locked to that
region.
You can see how a locked region 2 would cause you playback issues for
your region 1 disks.
The best overall plan (unbelievably) is to either get a second DVD
drive, and set it to a second region - then only play disks in it from
region 2 (and region 1 in your existing drive)
That might help if you regularly watch European disks.
A minor alternative might be to back up the DVD to another format such
as AVI/DivX video or WMV video, using tools such as DVDx :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdx/
I believe in that case DVDx treats the disk as a data disk, then
extracts the data and converts to another video format - rather than
asking the drive which region is supported, and locking you out from
playback of other region disks.
HTH
Cheers - Neil
------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2008
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs
|