Are personal DVD players region-free?...

[dave4shmups]

The small ones that are about the size of laptops? I ask, because there's a great site that makes aviation DVDs, but they're all in PAL. A guy who works for this company said that these PAL DVDs should work fine on a PC or Macintosh DVD player. That makes me wonder if they'd play on a personal DVD player. Because I could get one for a pretty cheap price at either Radio Shack or Target.

[HydrogLox]

A guy who works for this company said that these PAL DVDs should work fine on a PC or Macintosh DVD player.

That tends to be only true if the PAL DVD is Region 0/ALL rather than Region 2 (which is more typical). Often the DVD drive BIOS will attempt to enforce the drive's region setting, though it may allow switching the drive's region setting for a finite number of times (~5 times). There are software drivers that can bypass this behavior.

There are many low-end DVD players (like Philips/Funai) that are shipped with "Region Code Hacks", i.e. it's locked to your home region but a quick internet search will reveal the "song and dance" that you have to perform to make it "region free" (it will even output NTSC even if the source is PAL). Examples:
Philips DVP 3680 Region code hack
Philips PD 9030 Region code hack

[neorichieb1971]

I wouldn't risk it.

You need a pal converting DVD player. A brand called "oppo" make the best DVD players that play everything. Since blu ray is now top notch tech for discs you might be able to pick one up cheap.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Oppo-Digital-DV ... 3f22950d3d

That will play anything. there is a simple code you put into the DVD remote to change the region lock code.

edit - OPPO DV-981HD

Press SETUP Enter 9, 2, 1, 0 quickly Enter region (0 for multi-region) Press SETUP

If set to zero anything will play. It also has a PAL to NTSC converter built in. If you set the output to NTSC it will also play any PAL DVD on a NTSC (USA) TV.


Hope this helps. Its your best bet.

[Ed Oscuro]

Many name brand Blu-Ray / DVD players, burners, etc. can be software modified to play all region DVDs. Some need a firmware update, and others need a different process.

[blizzz]

You could also easily dump the DVD on your PC and convert it to mp4 or mkv...

[neorichieb1971]

If you just want to watch the DVD's then I suggest pirating them straight up. If you want to collect and support the cause then my method seems more sensible. I wouldn't buy the discs just to rip them, that sounds a bit weird.

[blizzz]

Why does it sound weird? Copying BluRays to mkv or CDs to flac is super easy, preserves the original quality and you can have all your media on a harddrive. And chances are that he already has a DVD player (or some other kind of media player) that can play mp4 from SD/USB and his problem is just that his player doesn't play PAL discs and he doesn't want to watch on a PC. Of course a region free player makes more sense if he wants to buy lots of PAL discs, but I just wanted to point out that it might not be necessary for a few movies (and you still "support the cause").