Portable DVD player. Region free. Pal/NTSC

[jtrinc]

Hello everyone,
I am considering getting a new portable DVD player and I was wondering if you guys had any recommendations. My old one (a 5 year old Nevir) has the hardest time playing burnt DVDs, so getting something that won’t have any issues with that is a must.
I am also interested in a region free player that can also play Pal and NTSC movies. My old Nevir player does that very well, by the way.
My price range is $75 to $150 (aprox).
Thanks so much!

[jman98]

It's getting harder and harder all the time to find normal DVD players in the USA and Canada that can be made region free. It has always been difficult to unlock speciality players such as portables. Your requirements were not too outlandish a few years ago, but I don't know if there is anything still available that can be unlocked. In general, some Philips players can still be unlocked so you might start there. But probably what you'll have to do is look online at Best Buy or a similar store and look up each model number they have for portables and then search each number in turn to see if a region free hack exists or not. Be sure you can take the player back because sometimes manufacturers make changes during production and that can break region free hacks that worked in the past. Hollywood doesn't want you to have region free playback, so they've forced most of the major manufacturers to make it harder and harder to unlock their players. At this time Sony and Samsung players of any type are among the most difficult in the world to unlock, so I would not buy a portable by either of those companies.

[jtrinc]

Thanks for the info, Jman98. It sucks that it is getting harder and harder to unlock players. One would assume that it would be the other day around. Actually having a player that can play NTSC and PAL movies is more important to me because most of the movies that I take with me when I travel are back ups of my DVDs. And I think that DVD Shrink removes the region by default.
Which players out there are the best when it comes to playing back up DVDs?
Thanks again!