Playing Blue-ray disc on LG BD620

[Liz Botha]

We have a Blue-ray disc of Amarcord (Criterion Collection) Monaural in Italian with English subtitles 1.85:1 aspect ratio. It will not play on our LG BD620 Blue-ray player. What can we do?

[jman98]

Criterion's licensing agreement mandates that either all or almost all of their releases be coded for region A playback only. I suppose there might be a small number of Criterion releases that are not region A coded, but I can't name any off hand. The British Film Institute (BFI) has similar restrictions for their BD releases and they are sort of the UK version of Criterion with the exception that they generally do not do the kind of restoration work that Criterion will sometimes do.

What this means is that you will have to either buy an expensive region free BluRay player, if you can even find such in South Africa. I've been to South Africa and I know that it's a modern country, but still, I am not sure that this will be an easy task to find such a player there. And you must be absolutely certain that your player really is region free for BluRay playback and not just DVD playback.

Alternatively you could buy AnyDVD HD or DVDFab HD Decrypter (or maybe use the free DVDFab passkey - no guarantees it will work though) and rip the BluRay disc to your hard drive. Then you could reburn it to BD-DL media using ImgBurn or if you wish install BD-Rebuilder and shrink the rip down to single layer BD size and burn to that. Ripping will remove region coding, making a re-burn region free. I suggest using Verbatim BD discs for burning. You will need to burn the rip as UDF 2.50 format.

[Liz Botha]

Thank you for this very prompt response. We'll see what we can do!

[fritzi93]

Just to add: your LG player can probably play AVCHDs. (My LG BD670 can). This is, essentially, a Blu-Ray movie re-encoded to a size small enough to burn to a blank DVD+/-R. You can do single-layer size or dual-layer size (better), also called BD5 or BD9. BDRebuilder can do this for you.

So if you don't have a Blu-Ray burner, that's an option for you.

I would suggest ripping whole disc with DVDFab (after the trial expires it's still fully functional for decrypting and copying to hard drive, it's just not updated as soon as the pay version). Select the movie folder on your hard drive with BDRB and do movie-only. Without menus and extras the quality will be better within the size constraints of an AVCHD.

Also, main movie is more likely to work. Burn with ImgBurn only.

Good luck.

[EDIT] If you go this route, refer to this page for help in setting up BDRebuilder:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=143716