DVD World Regions Questions/Problems

Ok - those of you who are world travelers - I need some help/answers please.

Here's the scenario - My wife is a Spanish teacher and she has a series of DVDs she use for her Spanish 4 class. The "tech" guy has figured out a temporary fix where she plays them through the DVD drive on her desk stop, but its a band aid as it doesn't allow her to pause/search/stop as she needs to for use in the class.

That said - we are looking for a BlueRay/DVD player that will do the following:

(1) At minimum - play the Spanish DVDs so she can use them in class as designed.

(2) Play both the Spanish/Euro region DVDs and also play North American region DVDs also.


Any real world info greatly appreciated.

thanks
M

 

Just ran into a similar issue with a Simon Crafar DVD I acquired from France. It wouldn’t play in my pricey Samsung Blue Ray surround sound system at all but the cheap $69 DVD player in my bedroom plays it no problem. Here is the unit for reference. It’s about 10 years old.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Found this - may help. More info in the comments section on the link.

1. Power on.
2. Open tray.
3. Push the info on remote once (with supplied remote). You will see numbers.
4. Press 9 for multi-region. Keep trying until you see the number 9 appear in upper left corner.
5. Power off.
6. Power on.

https://www.wisebread.com/make-your-dvd-player-region-free-in-seconds

 

DVD and BlueRay players are regionalized. You can change the region setting a very limited number of times - 5 is typical. The same is true for DVD/BlueRay drives in PC's and Mac's.

Copyright owners insisted on regionalization in the standard because their business model has distribution to different parts of the world at different times. So the discs are encoded for a particular region (1 to 5) and the players are designed to only play discs set for a particular region.

But the cheap players you get at the stores that sell electronics designed to be shipped by workers here to foreign countries often don't respect the regionalization setting on the disc, so they are more likely to play these out-of-region discs.

Go to a small electronics store in an immigrant neighborhood and buy a cheap BlueRay player. It should do fine.
Your other option is to buy a second player & set it to that desired region.

 

Gracias all for the responses so far - all sounds very helpful.

We have discussed the "two set up" possibility as this isn't a daily use tool, she uses it peripherally with her main instruction throughout the year.

Please keep the suggestions and insight coming.

 

Picked up a region free dvd player from Amazon 5 -6 years ago.

I got a LG blu-ray unit for $99 to play my 8 Hours of Suzuka race dvds. No issues at all.

Non blu-ray LG units are about 1/2 price wise of mine.

 

Realistically we need pics of the wife...I mean DVD player, before we can offer comp-e-tent advice.

 

Yamaha makes one that automatically reads and plays all regions.

 

It used to be you could buy one, perform a simple hack just one time, and be able to read DVDs from all zones. I have one sitting here that hasn't been switched on since the 2000's that does that.

 

You want to sell it Papa? Unless you think getting it from Europe to here makes no sense etc.

 

I would just give it to you but I'm not sure you could get it to work. I guess you could get around the 220 Volt thing but it also uses a specific type of old pre-HDMI French connector to the TV.

 

Understood.

Honestly - looks like based on some of the responses here there are definitely cost effective options we can explore.

 

I was wrong. It's been so long since I used it that I didn't think it was using an HDMI connection but it is. There are three ways to connected. I didn't mention it but it's definitely pre-Blu-ray, though. Plain DVD.
Either way, maybe look online first: it's probably worth less than what it would cost to ship from here. Maybe you can find a real cheap one that would be less of a headache to get to you. Phillips DVP 3980.

 

The store name is Going Out of Business. Everythimg has 'Sony guts'.

 

Gracias. I'll check and see what's out there first on the cheap and go from there.

Either way, thanks!

 

Do some searching around, you can buy an external bluray player and flash the firmware to make it region-free forever. You can also buy an internal version but if it's a work laptop I doubt that is an appealing option.

I did this recently so I could rip my bluray collection, by flashing the firmware my player was able to decrypt the disk so it could be succesfully ripped.

This is a great starting point:

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19634

If you have any questions feel free to reach out

 

Something like this?

https://www.amazon.com/Philips-EP20...s=all+region+dvd+player&qid=1620239080&sr=8-5