Yes it does. I've found "Rude Boy" on dvd, but it's only available with Region 2 encoding. Thank you Hollywood, you can now kiss my hindquarters.
Depending on your model of DVD player, there's a good chance a remote control code is available to eliminate your region codes from your machine. There are a couple of places on the internet that sell these codes for about $3 apiece (and many more places you can get them for free if you have the time to scout for them, so I'm told). I just ordered the code for my Philips machine today...I'll let you know if it works. I'm going to London in a couple weeks and hope to hit HMV & Virgin hard for movies if this all works out.
Let me know how it turns out. In this internet age of near instantaneou communication, Hollywood's lame attempt to control what people see is almost farcical. It's especially frustrating with films that may well not get US distribution.
Wow. thanks, cosmo. I'll be in London in a couple months. I'll have to pick up a couple cheap DVDs to try this out. According to that site, my DVD basically plays everything already, but with a couple clicks on the remote control, I now have a region-free player. I love the internet.
Cool. I'll have to bookmark the site for when I get a DVD player..... BUT this doesn't solve the PAL/NTSC issue does it? I have the most excellent History of Football DVD set from UK - the DVDs were region free but they wouldn't play on my housemate's DVD player since they were PAL encoded. I had to hook up my laptop to the TV instead.
That depends on the player itself and its compatability to your television. On mine it was just a matter of pressing the number 1 four times followed by the nember 0 one time and even PAL encoded DVDs are playable. However, when I looked at other players' pages on that site, it seems that my player is an exception to the rule of easiness. Some of them have you adding things, moving buttons, and much longer codes, only to have either serious side effects or no result at all. From one poster on that board: Not knowing much about this, I would venture to guess that this has to do with what your player is capable of playing before any alterations. With mine, it pretty much plays anything under the sun with the exception of non region 0 and 1 DVDs. However, most players don't play everything. this was a very important discovery I made when looking for a new player. It cost more, but it's worth it to have a very versatile machine.
Thanks. I'll worry about this more in a few months when I'm actually in the market for a DVD player. For now, I'll make do with my laptop-to-TV connection.
You can also buy a pre-hacked DVD player with a built-in PAL/NTSC converter. This place sells them for about 200 bucks.
The guy that I quoted has a different model than I have. Mine just plays the PAL encoded DVDs without a problem. All I have to do is switch to PAL on my menu screen. I was playing with it last night - it's basically made for region-free play but for some reason they encoded it for Region 1. But since the encoding was so amazingly easy to change, and the machine is made to play every format out there, I'm willing to bet that this (easy to chancge encoding) was done on purpose. Either way, I don't have the problem that that guy had with PAL DVDs.
yes, region encoding officially sucks. while i don't agree with it, i at least understand the motivation for not releasing Titanic in region 0 format before it gets the world wide theatre release. my question, is why in the crap do they region encode sports stuff, music and lesser known movies. they are shooting themselves in the foot. dumbarses. i recently did the hack on my APEX player. I've got a PAL format DVD enroute from England to see if it worked. I played a PAL format VCD in my player and it worked, so i'm assuming the DVD will too *fingers crossed*
Yeah, what the f is the point of this? The only thing I see that's remotely good out of this is that you're "forced" to buy a DVD from your country, which should help that country's economy. yeah, i'll have to check what model I have and try something out.
I just bought a portable DVD player with 8" screen, and the hack from the above list worked! I feel like some sort of super smart computer nerd to have actually converted the machine myself. My first order of business is to watch the complete 1st season of "The Office" on UK discs that I borrowed to test the machine.
I feel like I just hit the lottery. Every time I go through Heathrow and see the "special offers" on DVD at the HMV kiosk, I'm bummed hardcore. Now when I go to London next week, I'm gonna hit it hard.
I salivate as I peruse all of amazon.co.uk, as well as amazon.jp and pretty much any other place i feel like perusing DVDs.