Playing region free dvd

[Tammie K]

I purchased a dvd boxed set of Mrs. Brown's Boys from England. Before I did I asked him if they would play on my DVD player. He said they were region free and would play on any DVD player. Well I got them today and they won't play on either of my players: a Pioneer DVR-640H or a Samsung Blu-Ray player which also plays DVD's, model BD-P3600. Any ideas on what I can do?

[MilesAhead]

I have Philips 5990 players. They will play divx/xvid and wmv standard def and upscale to 1080P over HDMI. Also every Philips I ever owned played both PAL and NTSC format DVD discs. Every Philips I ever owned had a means of setting the region to 0 using the remote. No need to buy a "region free player" for $200. I didn't see an explicit prohibition in the rules but I'm not sure if region code discussion is frowned upon. If you look you can find. Put it that way.

Philips 5990 typically sell between $40 and $60. You can get HDMI cable from a discount house online for less than $10. I don't have a BluRay DVD player but I'm told they don't accommodate the user by letting them set them as "region free" like many standard DVD players do.

But if you like to watch a lot of foreign films as I do, it's great to have a player that doesn't care if the DVD is PAL or NTSC. It just converts to your TV type on the fly. Makes life a lot easier.

edit: btw the salesman may not have been lying. The disc may have its region set as 0 for play everywhere. It could be that it's the PAL format that can't be played on your equipment. With the Philips players I mentioned you don't even have to think about it once set up. Just make sure in the settings the TV Type is not set to Auto but to NTSC. If you set it to Auto it will set the TV type the same as the disc type and you'll just have a scrambled screen. If you set the TV type to NTSC it will convert PAL to NTSC in hardware on the fly. You won't even notice it happening.

[admin]

From an eBay listing of the DVD, it does appears the set is region 0.

What kind of error message are you seeing on your DVD/Blu-ray players when you try to play the disc? (just to make sure it is a region related problem)

The BD-P3600 (US model) appears not capable of playing PAL discs though. Not sure about the Pioneer DVR-640H, the only reference I found is that it may not allow you to play the UK PAL discs while you're recording something in NTSC (and vice versa), so you might have to go into the settings and change the TV tuner type to PAL (and then change back after watching the disc). But I think there is a NTSC only version of the 640 as well, which will then prevent you from playing the PAL discs as well.