DVD regions
 

I have a favourite DVD i play on my player recorder (Panasonic) and yesterday it told me that the disc was non-compatible - strange that it has been playing it for some time. The disc is Region 1 - I bought it in the US. My recorder, I though was all regions but is specified as 2.

Question is please how to change to all regions?

Merry Christmas.

There is no such thing as "all regions".

There is normally a way to switch between regions, although there are normally limits to the number of times you can switch.

Allegedly you can get a DVD player "chipped", but that sort of behaviour is not fit for discussion on PPRune. Your local highstreet dodgy may be able to advise further should you wish to persue that line of action.

Few things fill me with more venom than having received a DVD or bought one than to be told by machine that it is the 'wrong' region.

Free trade my arse.

It's just a way for the industry to control the market and rip people off, then they wonder why people want to hack their stuff. :ugh:

Some manufacturers put code details on their website to enable you to change to "region free"for DVDs.

I seem to remember on my Panasonic players it was possible, under the function or setup, to select region 1 or 2.
Because of this I bought a region 1 DVD and it worked OK.
However now it (region 1 DVD) only works on the blu ray player (BD35) so maybe this is time limited as mixtuer indicated above.
I can't find any way of changing region now!

PPRuNe Pop, did you get my PM's?

DVD Regionalisation is a disgrace. Anybody noticed that Blu-ray regions are different from standard DVD regions?

Fortunately I play DVDs and Blu-ray DVDs using a PC based Media Centre. There is a piece of software called AnyDVD which removes all the restrictions in real time and allows any region disc to play, the software runs in the background and is totally transparent in operation. Well worth the money in my view.

I have no connection with the software vendor but just hate the stitch up which is regionalisation.

SlySoft AnyDVD | any dvd, region free, backup dvd, dvd copy, copy dvd movies, dvd backup software, dvd copying software

the downside is that some games won't run if AnyDVD or any kind of disk image creation software is installed on the PC

I have previously unlocked LG DVD players using a process/sequence of programming functions that were freely found through giggle. A bit like playing twister, only you used the remote control.

Panasonici tend to be hard to unlock. If you tell us the exact model you've got, someone could probably tell you if an unlock is available.

At one stage Panasonic/Matsu****a were actually a bit devious: they were legally obliged to only sell the drives locked in Europe, but then posted firmware upgrades on their website which rendered the drives "free"
However somewhere along the line they got threatened by the law and had to pull back from doing this
As far as I'm aware the other big manufacturer groups played things straight and never officially released any patches to do this - but some leaked unofficially. In some cases it was possible to flash one drive as another: e.g. there were occasions where it was possible to flash a locked Sony drive with the firmware from a differently branded (e.g. LG) but otherwise identical Optiarc product...... You could sometimes do the same with the TSS Samsung-Toshiba group products.
However, unless you knew for sure, it was a good way of turning a drive into a brick. There are specialists sites devoted to this kind of thing

Of course, theres more than just the drive to worry about - the playback software also has to be region-free friendly, some of it isn't