Family Guy = Region 2, i live in Region 1. help?

[gotfrog]

i reall really want ot get the Season 1 DVD for Family Guy. As well as Futurama Season 1 which i s also region 2. Now, i have a Sony DVP-NS300 DVD player, i have sen some hacks for this, but is this reliable to use? Will anything be different than region 1 dvd's (quality, etc.)? please help

[pants]

even if you could hack it to play region 2, you still need to deal with the issue of it being PAL not NTSC. most or no sony players don't have a built in signal converter. you could get a cheapo sampo/daewoo/apex and hack that to convert the dvd. which should do it fine, look at the nerd out forums for more info. but if you think you might be getting a lot of region 2 PAL dvd's i would go for the malata n996, which you can get at various online sites like www.avdeals.com/malata it's a great player and better than the others cause it can do great conversion, but costs more. the other dvd player will convert non-anamorphic dvd's just fine, and the FG dvd is non-anamorphic, but you get into trouble with these players on anamorphic dvd cause it squeezes the image cause the converter isn'tvery good. but the malata is top notch and region free out of the box. but don't get the other model of the malata cause it doesn't have the same chip inside as the n996. so it doesn't do the conversion very good either. but the n996 is great.

pants

[gotfrog]

thanks for the help! :D

but are you saying that there's no way i can play this dvd without another DVD player?

btw, i have a dvd-rom if there's a way i can play it on that, but i really want to watch it on my tv.

[pants]

you can look at your tv manual and see if it can take a PAL signal, but if you live in the usa, hardly any tv's do this, some do but not all. you could buy a tv/video out card for your computer and play the dvd on your computer and output to tv, but you still might need to make our dvd-rom drive region free. which is probably easier than your set top player. you can also buy a stand alone converter box to convert the signal from pal to ntsc but all the reaserch i've done for those, they all produce a pretty crappy conversion and it's only till you get up to a pretty hefty prioce tag that the converters actally start getting good. so for the money the cheapest solution would be be to buy the malata cause it's about $300 and converts great. you need to pay at least $600 and up to get a good standalone. also look at the

dvdtalk.com/forum

page in the international section and do a search for the malata for more info. or you can use hotline or morpheus to download the vcd's of FG and watch those on your tv, if your player can play burnt vcd's?????