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This Christmas I, like many others, received a DVD player, a SONy, real nice..5.1 surround sound and all). I immediately went to connect it to my TV, a nice 19" Magnavox.
I pressed play and lo and behold a great big error message.
So I plug the DVD into my vcr and put on The Matrix. I begin watching it when I noticed the saturation of the screen go from normal, to obscenely (and unwatchably) high. Then it would fade back to normal. Every few seconds or so this would happen again, resulting in an unwatchable movie.
So I scratch my head in puzzlement. Was something wrong with my DVD player? Or was it my VCR? I'd never had any problems watching normal movies. So I go and I hook my DVD up to another vcr and try it again. Same problem. Hmmm. I thumbed through the manual, and I finally come across a small paragraph which seemed to talk about region restrictions.
Probably nothing to do with the problem I had.
Turns out I have a player locked into region 2 and I am in a region 1 area in the US.
Did a search for a solution on the net and found through a similar forum to this details of a website http://web.ukonline.co.uk/mwill96/dvdunlocks4u.htm which I thought I would try due to good recommendations.
It worked. My Sony is region free and I thought having looked at various websites that there was no way of doing it short of opening up the DVD and paying a clever engineer lots of money. Did it all myself with the instructions.
These ridiculous copy protection schemes are brought in by the MPAA in order to protect itself of losing a few thousand dollars it can surely afford, will instead cost me the poor college student consumer $260+. This is ridiculous. Has anyone else had a negative experience regarding legal use of DVDs?
I pressed play and lo and behold a great big error message.
So I plug the DVD into my vcr and put on The Matrix. I begin watching it when I noticed the saturation of the screen go from normal, to obscenely (and unwatchably) high. Then it would fade back to normal. Every few seconds or so this would happen again, resulting in an unwatchable movie.
So I scratch my head in puzzlement. Was something wrong with my DVD player? Or was it my VCR? I'd never had any problems watching normal movies. So I go and I hook my DVD up to another vcr and try it again. Same problem. Hmmm. I thumbed through the manual, and I finally come across a small paragraph which seemed to talk about region restrictions.
Probably nothing to do with the problem I had.
Turns out I have a player locked into region 2 and I am in a region 1 area in the US.
Did a search for a solution on the net and found through a similar forum to this details of a website http://web.ukonline.co.uk/mwill96/dvdunlocks4u.htm which I thought I would try due to good recommendations.
It worked. My Sony is region free and I thought having looked at various websites that there was no way of doing it short of opening up the DVD and paying a clever engineer lots of money. Did it all myself with the instructions.
These ridiculous copy protection schemes are brought in by the MPAA in order to protect itself of losing a few thousand dollars it can surely afford, will instead cost me the poor college student consumer $260+. This is ridiculous. Has anyone else had a negative experience regarding legal use of DVDs?
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