Region 1 plays on all players???

snadge · Member Joined: 29 Apr 2006 Location: UK

I bought a DVD for a friend which is region 1 - but on the ebay site it says region1 for US,CA but will PLAY ON ALL DVD PLAYERS... if that is so why bother with the region at all???

And guess what - it plays on my Region 2 DVD player (Toshiba SD370-E) and Laptop
Though DVD Shrink reports its protected on region 1 and asks if id like to remove it
what others thoughts on this?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item ... amp;ih=016

jman98 · Member Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Location: Freedonia

It is NOT true that a region 1 ONLY disc will play on "all DVD players". If you can find the old DVD Decrypter program and look at your DVD with it, you'll probably see that the DVD is coded for multiple regions. I have seen DVDs in this country that get encoded for only region 1, or regions 1 and 2, or regions 1, 2 and 4 or regions 1, 2, 3 and 4. As long as it has a setting for region 2, you're good. My guess is that this DVD is encoded for region 1 and 2 and possibly a few others.

snadge · Member Joined: 29 Apr 2006 Location: UK

its encoded region 1

I asked the seller and he said its cos its an old film?
Like i say it works on my Toshiba that Im assuming is region 2 locked

hech54 · CONFUSED Joined: 26 Jul 2001 Location: Yank in Europe

snadge · Member Joined: 29 Apr 2006 Location: UK

haha thats what i thought

hech54 · CONFUSED Joined: 26 Jul 2001 Location: Yank in Europe

Probably what he MEANT to say was that it was NTSC/Region Free....that's if he had any brains. But even that is doubtful if it is/was a factory pressed DVD. Hollywood....no matter how old the movie...doesn't DO Region Free. I've seen quite a few PAL concert DVDs that were region free out of Australia ...but not much coming out of America.
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turk690 · Member Joined: 06 Jul 2003 Location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

I once bought an NTSC DVD in Hong Kong which duly stated it was region 3 on the cover. Then I saw the same DVD in the USA which said it was region 1, which I rented to see how the two were different. When I popped both into the PC drive one after the other, DVDDecrypter says both are bit-identical, and both coded for regions 1, 3, & 4. Only the covers were different. I suppose snadge's DVD belongs to this categoree...
There are other cases of (deliberate?) mislabeling of certain DVDs: many region 2 DVDs (normally PAL) say that they have so-and-so subtitles. But I have a DVD that says on its cover that it has Turkish subtitles, yet the disc actually doesn't have them.
Now that Blu-ray is the de-facto HD disc standard, we are yet again poised to wrestle with how to get a player that will play BD regions A, B, & C, and DVD regions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Oh, and 7 & 8. Really, if it's meant to control viewing by region, then governments, in conjunction with all of the other h/w & s/w powers-that-be across the world should make it illegal & punishable by a thousand tickles to your bare soles the importashun of BDs & DVDs that do not match that particular point on earth whence you are in possession of them therewith. Either that or toss the whole region-coding scheme to Antartica. (What region code is Antartica, by the way??)
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