regions.

[NateDizzle]

i have some retail dvds from the uk. i live in canada. so they dont work. how can i burn these to get them to play on my north american dvd player?

[Baldrick]

https://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks

If you can't find a region hack for your player then could you do a dvd backup, https://www.videohelp.com/dvdbackup#6;65

And your dvd player must also support PAL or be able to output ntsc for your TV.

[jman98]

Since you say you have "some retail DVDs" I think we can assume that means you have more than 1. I advise people here that unless it's a one time thing, it's really best to just get a multiregion DVD player. They are very cheap these days. Philips, for example, makes several which would cost maybe $70 Canadian or so. It is a lot of time and effort to rip and convert PAL DVDs to NTSC and it's just a lot better in my opinion to just buy a converting multiregion DVD player and be done with it. However, I value my spare time and I think I have better things to do with it than spend hours converting PAL DVDs to NTSC just to watch them, but plenty of people think that their spare time is worthless and it somehow makes sense to do this conversion 50 times or more rather than spend a palty few dollars for a converting multiregion DVD player. Please investiage Baldrick's links as you might already have a player than can be made to work in multiregion mode and your player might also already be able to convert PAL to NTSC. Most NTSC DVD players actually can convert PAL to NTSC. Not all, but most can.

[guns1inger]

As the jman has pointed out, you have two issues potentially to deal with.

Region - the arbitrary coding of discs to areas of release, and
Format - the broadcast format in use in different areas of the world

If you have a Sony player in particular, it is difficult to work out which is giving you the problem, as even multi-region Sony plays can be tied to one format (especially in NTSC countries), but will give error messages that talk about the incorrect region.

Removing region codes is easy. Any ripping software removes the region by default and sets the disc to all regions.

Format conversion is a different kettle of fish, and the best results are obtained by changing your hardware.