Should DVD's made in Europe work in an American DVD player? The reason I'm asking is I received a promotional DVD from Diana and when I try to play it on my machine I get an "Error" message.

DB Bill,

Europe has a differant "DVD zone" then the US.

You need to take your DVD player to a shop(for example where you bought it), and get them to make it "zone free". This should only cost a few dollars, and be done in about 5 minute on most DVD players. When this is done, you can play any DVD bought anywhere in the world.

Erik,

While I agree that this is a no-brainer for most Euro-Electronic shops, it's full on rocket science to those American stores. But a electronics repair guy could probably do it if he had the equipment.

DB Bill. I have about 200 PAL hunting DVDs. I would suggest throwing it in your computer instead of your DVD player. Mine plays both systems. However you can only switch from PAL to NTSC so manytimes before your computer locks into a mode.

I have a multi-system dvd player (illegal to sell in the USA, thank hollywood for that one) and a multi system tv. You should be able to use a DVD copy program and it will ask you if you want to change it.

You can probably download the software from limewire for free.

There are 3 other international regional DVD codes. I don't know if a NTSC TV would play a PAL encoded dvd if the player was uncoded. Just not enough room in my brain to figure that one out. I beleive it would as Erik said work.

Bill,

If you google the name of your DVD player plus something like "unlock zones" or maybe "international", you can very often find the correct code to enter to make play all the various zones..Usually it just a short key sequence you enter via the DVD remote...

Not sure about the PALS/NSTC issue; I have a really cheap DVD player and it still plays both?

Regards,

Pete

No problem at all, I use a free downloadable soft called "DVD Decrypter", which, combined with the also free "DVD Shrink" takes care of any zone bound or copy protected DVD.

Now that Sony and Toshiba are coming out with two different 'blu-ray' systems that ought to confuse things even more !!

There is a freeware program out there on the net called DVD Shrink. It removes the zone coding as well as the CSS protection but is illegal over here. Thank you, Hollywood!

I had my DVD player "de-zoned" so that I could view both US and European DVD's and it was a fairly simple matter. I understand however that the Sony's are a little more complicated because of their own "firmware". Either way, most of the televisions in Europe are at least PAL and SECAM (France)recordable/playable and NTSC playable. This may be where US sold TV's fall short.

quote:

Originally posted by Wink:
I had my DVD player "de-zoned" so that I could view both US and European DVD's and it was a fairly simple matter.

How exactly did you do that?