What options are available to view/play a Cecil B. DeMille/Gary Cooper (or any other) movie on dvd issued in Spain that is available for purchase only in non-USA format? Are multi-format players available in US?
You’re getting in to rules violations terrain here based on the DMCA making it illegal to circumvent any content protection system. IANAL and how specifically the law applied in this case would be in debate.
I don’t think owning a multi-region dvd player is illegal in the United States. They’re openly advertised with this feature on Amazon and other outlets.
Yeah, just search “region free DVD player” on Amazon and you’ll find a ton of them from name brands (Sony, Panasonic, etc).
My DVD player died back when Sherlock premiered in the UK long before it showed up here. Then we got an edited version. But Amazon.UK had the DVD’s.
So I bought an all-region DVD player at Amazon for a bit more than a “regular” one…
Sherlock doesn’t make you go to that trouble any more, but the DVD player still works fine on both formats.
You can also watch it on your pc if you have a dvd drive. There are region-free software players, and even the ones that aren’t region free can be changed, although a finite number of times.
ETA:
Depending on your DVD player, there are remote control codes that unlock region coding.
What I did was to find a website that provided the region-free hacks for various DVD players and then purchased, from Target for about fifty bucks, a Philips DVD player that had a code available to make it region-free (or to change the region).
Or, are you asking about the format the DVD uses for encoding? DVDs are recorded in a standard way no matter where they are produced. The only difference between a DVD from France and one from the US (of the same movie, of course) is the region code and any nationalization (dubbed language, etc.).
VCR tapes, on the other hand were recorded using the basic TV recording method in that country (PAL for the UK, NTSC for the US and so on). I do not believe there were any players on the market which would play these multiple formats.
Bob
They still come in different frame rates - 29.97fps for the US, 25fps for PAL. Most DVD players and TVs accommodate for that, but you may hear subtle voice pitch changes.
When I watch a UK DVD (or even some British programs on broadcast or cable), I see what looks like some choppiness, which I assumed was due to the difference in frame rate.
Faults in playing a PAL disc in a NTSC setup are due to the equipment. Good devices (DVD players/TVs) won’t change the pitch or cause noticeable choppiness.