can't play region 0 pal dvds ><

ok, so i'm new to the whole region/coding thing, i bought a dvd box set that's region 0 PAL after reading that region 0 was basically "region-free" and should play on all dvd players, not realizing that the fact that it was PAL meant that "all" didn't actually mean "all."

well, my dvd player refuses to read the discs so i tried my computer... it won't read them either. i've got a dell inspiron E1705 running the XP media center edition, by default it tried to play the dvd using the media center program and gave me the error message "media center cannot play this DVD because the disc prohibits playback in your region of the world. you must obtain a disc that is intended for your geographic region."

is there anything i can do to make a region-free pal dvd play on my computer?

 

i am not sure if this gonna help, but try it: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Codec-Packs-Video-Codecs/Storm-Codec.shtml

 

Hi.

try this DVDregionkiller

http://www.digital-digest.com/software/download.php?sid=1&ssid=0&did=1

regards

John.

 

The DVD you purchased can be played on DVD players of all regions, but the content is encoded in PAL, which most DVD players in the US cannot play, since they only support the NTSC format.

You will have to convert the DVD into NTSC. There are many ways to do this, one of the easiest being with VLC player (note that it will be technically ripping your DVD, so after the conversion you will be left with a file which you can play on your PC). A quick guide can be found: http://www.jakeludington.com/dvd_hacks/20061125_convert_pal_dvd_for_pc_playback.html

 

guide looks interesting, might be worth the time-consuming process of ripping from the dvd, converting and burning the files onto new dvds so i can watch on a TV instead of the comp... did manage to get a quickie fix from the first two posts though

i followed the softpedia link and downloaded/installed the player, didn't get an error message like i did with media center/WMP but once i got it to bring up the main dvd menu, i couldn't get it to actually play. downloading the regionkiller program on top of that did the trick though!

thank you guys for the fast responses, now i can watch some old transformers shows while i wait for world of warcraft to come back to life

 

ENJOY

John.

 

PAL50 or PAL60? If it is PAL60, I'm completely suprised it won't play on your PC. If PAL50, still fairly suprised. Does anyone know why these don't work on PCs? PCs handle a lot weirder things than playing PAL50/60.

 

Wow I didn't know it's possible to convert PAL to NTSC. That's great! There is an old British TV show I liked when I was a kid and have been trying to get my hands on it. They only made DVD versions of it in PAL, and I don't want to bother with the old NTSC VHS's. This is great!

SuperTed & the Spotty Man here I come!

 

Yeah, you can find the formulas to transform the colorspace from PAL to NTSC, and as far as the 50Hz issue, most of the time they just speed the whole thing up a small amount and most people don't notice. Otherwise, you can do something similar to 3:2 pulldown that is done for feature films to bring it up to 60Hz.

 

yeah, i was pretty surprised myself, especially since i'd read somewhere online that most of the time if they won't play on your dvd player, they *will* play on your comp yet they didn't initially work on mine. maybe chalk it up to the fact that dell sucks?

 

Maybe it's just WMP. I wouldn't be suprised at all if MS played ball with the entertainment industry and nerfed their software so it wouldn't read cross-region.

 

Its probably more like a software issue. PAL and NTSC are very similar, but VERY different. No doubt you'd need the decoder necessary to even use the PAL format.

 

PAL is a different color space, different resolution, and (in the case of PAL50) different framerate, but uses the same encoding (MPEG4) as NTSC. If it weren't for DVD player programming, PAL discs would play (granted the color and resolution would be out of wack) on an NTSC system. Given that a computer can handle all matter of weird resolutions, color spaces, framerates, and even encodings, a PAL DVD on a computer should be no problem at all.

I've actually worked on DVD hardware, and can tell you from personal experience that any computer worth its weight in cordwood can handle the conversion task between PAL and NTSC. The question is whether or not the conversion is locked out in either hardware or software. The companies that are in lockstep with the MPAA (and anyone that wants that little "DVD Video" logo on their device) design their players to lock out this behavior. Those that aren't don't.