Posted by Jay G. on 02/17/06 06:18

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 02:09:55 GMT, Don Del Grande wrote:

> most DVD players in the USA won't play PAL DVDs - not
> even Region 0 ones. (I tried a R0 DVD - the Amnesty International
> show collection - on my Sony DVD recorder and it couldn't read it,
> while my cheap Daewoo player had no problems converting it to an NTSC
> signal.)

Sony's are notoriously bad at playing import DVDs. Making one region-free
usually involves physically replacing a chip, in comparison to the remote
hacks and firmware updates possible on most other manufacturer's players.
Then they are unable to convert PAL to NTSC, which is another hurdle.
Sony, unlike most other manufacturers, has an movie studio division in its
corporate structure, so they have a much more vested interest in limiting
the viewing of imports.

It's hard to say just how many DVD players in the US are capable of
becoming region-free, or can convert PAL to NTSC. However, I have heard of
players from Philips, Samsung, Cyberhome, Toshiba, RCA, Daewoo, and a few
other brands of being capable of such. What's more, my Samsung is sold in
an exact same model with only slightly different firmware in the UK. As
the prevelence of "all-in-one" decoder chips emerge, and the economics of
scale make it better to produce single models that only need slight
refinements for different countries, I think that the number of at least
new DVD players in the US with the capabilities are probably in the
majority.

> There are few openly region-free players in the USA for a good reason;
> they are illegal, as they are considered "bypassing a copyright
> technology".

Actually, it's more that it violates the manufacturer's license with the
DVD forum. There are retailers and such that operate fairly openly selling
modified players, and I have yet to hear of a legal case against them. In
some cases these are retailers that have gotten cease-and-desist orders
concerning certain import DVDs they carried, but never on the DVD players.

-Jay

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