I’m considering buying a cheap DVD player here in France.
Here are my questions:
I know there are ‘zones’ and DVD’s only play in the zone registered by the player. Does that mean that I can’t see DVD’s from the States or that they don’t have the full language menu?
Am I correct in understanding when you rent a DVD, it comes with a language choice menu? Would this mean I’d be able to rent DVD’s from the video store here and watch them in English?
(I’m a bit late to the DVD phenomenon.)
DVDs encoded for a particular region won’t play on players for another region. It is possible to get multi-region DVD players which ignore the region encoding (the legality of this varies, check your local laws and ordinances, they’re legal, but awkward to get hold of, in the UK); some region 1 (American) DVDs have what’s called Region Coding Enhancement, though, so can’t be played on anything but a region 1 player.
Not everyone takes region encoding seriously; some Region 2 (European) and region 4 (Australian) DVDs are actually Region 0, encoding-free, so will play on any player (except you have to check whether they’re PAL or NTSC - as with video players, some DVD players handle both formats, some don’t).
The language/soundtrack extras you get on a disc vary greatly. I’ve seen some that have a plethora of soundtracks in everything from English to Amharic, while others are avowedly monoglot. The only thing to do is check the details on the back of the DVD box when you rent it.
Thanks, Steve.
It must be nice to be able to close a post single-handedly.
Now, to go and research the actual DVD players themselves!
(No matter what the cost, it certainly beats paying 9E to see a movie at the theater! Parisian movie theater popcorn is horrible, though it does come in the salty AND sweet variety.)
Does Parisian theaters serve beer and/or wine or just soft drinks?
I’ve never seen beer and wine at the theater, but I’ve only been to a handful of them. They do serve beer at McDonald’s though.
the region codes are for where the dvd is SOLD not what language they may be in. Anything you get from a local store is going to be correct for the region you are in.
Anahita,
this may not affect you in La Belle France, but I have owned two DVD players (and a older Laserdisc, too). Because quality tends to be very good with low end models, I bought low end.
All three of these players had some problem with playing disc they were supposed to be able to.
The DVD player that went in my computer wouldn’t play something like 5% of the discs.
The standalone DVD player will not play something like 2% of discs. (It was worse before it occured to me to buy one of those “DVD cleaning discs”.)
The Laserdisc player, (largely a different machine and format from DVD!), played all discs until I loaned it to someone for a few months (and drove it over a couple hundred miles of road). Now the Laserdisc player will not play about 15% of discs.
So, I would not recommend a computer DVD player. Our local video rental store will not give refunds if DVDs don’t play on a computer.
The moral of the story is not to buy the absolute cheapest DVD player, if you can afford to. Unless you don’t mind not being able to play a DVD from time-to-time.