Brief background:
I was at a magic convention this past August and met some magicians from Japan. They spoke very little English and I speak absolutely no Japanese, but it being a magic convention and all, I decided to try my best to communicate with them and get to know them better. We ended up swapping business cards and sharing some good magic effects.
Fast forward to yesterday:
I received a DVD in the mail, the return address is from Japan. It is from my Japanese friends from the convention. I figure it is either a video of their full stage act or video they took at the convention in August that they wanted me to have a copy of.
Unfortunately I am not able to read the disk on any computer I have, nor will it play on any DVD player I have. On the computer it doesn’t even recognise that the disk is in the drive. Same with the DVD player. On the cover of the disk case has something hand written on it in Japanese[(Which you can view here.)](http://www.vbisd.org/users/jbenn/images/japanese writing.jpg), but since I neither speak or read Japanese, I am at a loss to at least know what is on the disk.
Question 1: What does the Japanese writing say?
Question 2: My odds of actually being able to read the disk are slim to none, but if anyone has any ideas on how to read a disk that was formatted and written to on a Japanese computer, please let me know.
The writing just says, “Tendo Magic Convention Contest.”
So far as I am aware Japanese formats for CDs and DVDs are exactly the same as the US. There is a CD video format, the name of which I can’t think of, but I haven’t heard of that in years.
What would really help would be if you could open the disk in Windows Explorer and say what the file extensions are. You might need to turn on the “Show known file extensions”* option, if you don’t have it on in Windows Explorer.
The DVD doesn’t even get recognised in Windows. It just doesn’t get to the point where it will let me even browse the files on it so there really isn’t a way to do what you suggest. I think it was just a bad burn when they burned the disk and that the disk is unreadable, especially now that you have confirmed that the formats of disks in Japan and the US are exactly the same.
Bolding mine. This isn’t quite true, my wife has a large number of DVDs and CDs sent by her mother in Japan that will not play from an off the shelf US DVD player.
Now I have to write him back saying that the disk was bad… and I have no idea how to do that. LOL.
Maybe I will write it in English and have him go through the trouble of finding someone to translate it for him… then again, he would be very impressed and surprised if I sent him a letter in Japanese.
Anyone here willing to translate a letter to Japanese for me?
I have software that will allow me to change the region code on my DVD-ROM so I supppose I could try that, but I’ve tried playing DVD’s from other regions and my player will explicitly state that the DVD is not the correct region. This one doesn’t even get recognised by the drive, the player software, nor the OS, which leads me to believe that the disk is probably bad.
Yes, if you try to play a wrong-region disk it will just pop up a “Wrong Region” thing when you try to play it, not be entirely unreadable. Sounds like a bad disk to me.
If you post a (short) letter, I’m sure that someone will be fine to translate it for you here.
All video DVDs use the UDF filesystem, regardless of what country they came from. If it doesn’t, then, by definition, it’s not a video DVD.
There is a difference between region codes, video formats (PAL/NTSC), and the files and filesystem of a DVD. Regardless of the region code or video format, the files on any valid DVD, video or otherwise, can be accessed by a computer with a DVD drive. If a computer cannot even read the disc’s filesystem and list the files, then it’s pretty much certain that the disc itself is bad.
Most burned DVDs are “Region 0” (more accurately, all the region codes are set), and a computer’s DVD playing software should be able to handle both NTSC and PAL discs.
Your problem may simply be that it’s a home-burned DVD (in fact, I assume it is, given the hand-written cover that you scanned). Ergo, it could be that your drive does not read the burn format that he used. Most DVD burners that you buy now can read and burn all sorts of formats (DVD: +r, -r, +rw, -rw, -ram), but if you are using either an older DVD burner to read, or a simple DVDrom drive, that may be the cause right there.
If for instance, I burn a DVD+R disc in my burner, none of my other computers can read it, because they do not understand the format, and I get the errors you’re having. Similarly, you may have the same issue with your DVD player, especially if it is an older one.
If it’s not on the surface of the disc itself somewhere (i.e. it’s a printable disc), it should be in the little ring around the centre. If you can find out what format the burnt disc is, it should help immensely.
Another possibility that might be worth checking out (I doubt it’s this but it’s easy to check) is that the disc might be bent or warped slightly. Hold it next to a working disc and see if you can see any space between them.
