There’s some DVD’s avail on Amazon UK that aren’t for sale here yet. Trouble is they are Region 2, whatever that means.
How can I tell if my DVD player (Panasonic DVD CV51) can play Region 2 (Europe, Japan) dvd’s? I’ve checked the internet and found a fairly exhaustive spec sheet but I couldn’t find anywhere that said what regions it plays.
Should I assume it’s Region 1 (assuming, of course, that Region 1 is the U.S.? ) and wait til the DVDs are avail here?
If you bought it in a retail store in the US, it’s Region 1 (North America). If you have a DVD ROM drive in your computer, you can change it to play Region 2 discs. (I did it!)
There are also some stand-alone DVD players that can be set up using the remote to switch regions (or be region-free), but the Panasonic isn’t one of them.
The reason the company’s spec sheets don’t usually specify the region is that it is set for whatever region it is sold in. This also means that just about any consumer DVD player can be modified to play in different regions. There are companies that will do this for you (sometimes all they need to do is pop the cover and desolder some jumpers, often they add a chip) for a certain price.
That isn’t always the best solution; not only does it void the manufacturer’s warranty, but some of them will no longer play certain DVDs, if they are set to be region-free. The companies that don’t want you buying DVDs from other regions came up with “Region-Code Enhancement” (RCE) – an enhancement that prevents the DVD from playing if the player is not set to the specific region requested by the DVD.
I guess the short answer is that I’m s.o.l.
Thanks for the input!
L-