Fellow dopers, it’s come to this: there are several BBC tv programs I’m lusting after on Amazon - all of which only come in PAL format, natch.
And, natch, my little Memorex DVD player (a whopping $15 at Target on Black Friday last year) works just fine for Region 1 DVDs. I’ve been quite happy with it, but I highly doubt it can do Region 2. Like I said, it only set me back $15. No great loss. I intend to boot it upstairs to my office, where it will spend the rest of its days with my last working VHS player, which is connected to my last working tv-tube tv.
Since I really don’t want to plonk down in my less-than-comfortable office chair to watch region 2 DVDs on my computer, I need a new DVD player that can handle both formats. I have a nice 40-inch, flatscreen tv for the downstairs, but I don’t have any Blu-Ray DVDs if that’s important.
According to some of the reviews, my DVD player (here) will play R2 disks with a code. I’ve never tried it myself, though. I really like this DVD player, for the record.
Strangely, it’s often the cheaper DVD players that will be the most flexible with respect to region codes and format playing. Where they sometimes fall down is mechanical quality.
Check out VideoHelp.com for information on changing region codes in your player. You can look up by model number.
I have and still own 4 Phillips DVD players. All are capable of being set to Region 0 (Region Free) and I have used them to play Regions 1, 2 and 5 DVDs, in all cases without a hitch. I cannot recommend them highly enough. The code is easily obtainable, and the Blue Shirts at Best Buy are well aware that this happens, and actually pointed me to them with the comment that they sold most of them to people needing this capability. Around $40 each time.
Ditto on the Philips. Buy one for $40, play the shit out of it for a year until it conks out. Buy another Philips. Repeat as necessary. Converting to all-region is a simple remote control code.
A few years ago I decided to forego the above advice and bought a $250 player that supposedly had some magical chipset, blah, blah, blah. Didn’t work any better than the Philips and it, too, conked out after a year.
The Philips plays all region and converts PAL-sourced DVDs to play on your NTSC television. A must for me, as about half of my 800 DVDs need one if not both of these capabilities.
Thirding the suggestion of a Philips DVD player. In my case, I checked which models were available locally at Best Buy or Target and then looked them up in the website suggested by Sunspace before I went out and bought the player. Now, the first player did die after a year or two, but they each cost $40-50. (The only weirdness is that the framerate was a little jerky, perhaps because of the PAL to NTSC conversion.)
