DVD regions?

[asdf]

Hello all,

I bought an Electrohome EH8181A DVD player in January of 2003. for some reason the DVD player doesn't play all DVDs. I bought both the first and second Harry Potter DVDs and tried to play them on my DVD player.The first Harry Potter movie plays just fine but the second Harry Potter movie doesn't play. The movie flashes on for about 2 secs and then flashes off for about 10 secs and continues doing this, although the audio is just fine.I encountered the same problem for other DVDs such as Drumline, The Way Home, MIIB, and Spiderman. I looked it up in the manual and it said it won't play becuase of the region of the DVD????Is this true? I asked a store employee about this and he said the old DVD players can play all of the DVDs but the new ones can't. Does anybody else have this problem? Is there a way to fix this? Are there new DVD players that can play all of the DVDs and what old ones can play all of the DVDs? and who else out there thinks that this is completely f------ stupid?

[nempo]

i cant help you and sorry about that but...can anyone till me what the dvd region was created for? Why do they have it? whats the man purpose it's stopping us from doing? I have never understood why they have a dvd region.

[txpharoah]

Greed.

[np]

On this site your can find how to fix your problem... go in DVD hacks.

[tompika]

The regionhack is right here
https://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks.php?select=ElectroHome+EH8181

However region locked players don`t even start to play other discs.
Your problem must be something else.

Maybe macrovision.
Isn`t your player connected to VCR and the VCR to the TV?

http://www.nerd-out.com/darrenk/Electrohome_EH8181/EH-8181patch.htm

[pbhalerao]

asdf,

I totally sympathize with you regarding region problems. But you wrote:

The movie flashes on for about 2 secs and then flashes off for about 10 secs and continues doing this, although the audio is just fine.

This appears to be macrovision problem. You should connect your DVD player directly to the TV. If your DVD player is already connected directly to the TV (and not through a VCR as tompika suggests), then your DVD player might be faulty.

Nempo,

As txpharoah mentioned, DVD regions were created to satisfy the greed of the copyright owners. The official reason given is: movies are released at different times in the world - first in the US region (obviously), then in Europe, then in Australia, Latin America, etc. So while the movie is running in threatres in Europe, a European user could buy the DVD (say over the net) from the US (where the DVD is already released) and deprive the Eurpoean distributors of their "rightfull" earnings. This is crap - nowadays most of the movies have a world-wide release anyway. To ensure regions, 99% of DVD's and players are region encoded.

The fact of the matter is - we are now stuck up with another complexity as if the NTSC and PAL division was not enough. However, some good news - there are many online stores that sell region-free, PAL/NTSC, 110V/240V, 50Hz/60Hz DVD players. Also most DVD players can be region hacked.

To overcome the above problems, MPAA/DVD Consortium have started releasing latest movies with Region Code Enhanced (RCE) disks. These disks do not play with region-free/region hacked DVD players. What these disks do is, as follows:

a) an RCE disk requests the player for its region code.
b) the region locked (normal) player returns the region code and if the region matches the disk, playback begins.
c) the region-free/region hacked player returns the region code as '0' and it obviously will never match the region of the disk. Hence playback never begins.

However, it is possible to beat RCE also - provided that the DVD player is not hardware-hacked to be made as region free. Most DVD players have an undisclosed menu option to set/choose the region. This is done using the remote. Most of the region code hacks mentioned in this site are of this type. Using this method, it is possible to play an RCE disk by first setting the region code of the player and then playing the disk.

Regards,

[dcsos]

If you have the luxury of creating the DVD again, try submitting all the .IFO files to IFO edit

This program can pick up REGION CONTROL ENHANCEMENTS that a DECRYTOR has missed, and elimiated them
use the REGION -FREE button after loading the ifo in the program..then save the result over the ifo you modded

[asdf]

thanks everyone i finally fixed the problem. it turns out that it wasnt a region problem but it was macrovision. i connected the DVD player directly to the TV and now the DVDs work perfectly. thanks everyone. ur help is appreciated