[quote=“daasgrrl”]Do 3C still have the DVDinfo brand? We got one of those for NT$2880 and it works fine for everything we’ve used, different regions, PAL and NTSC. The funny thing is that the instruction manual said it only handled region 3[/quote]To able to make DVD players, you need a licence from the DVD gods, and that licence says that all DVD players must only play discs from one region. That’s officially. Unofficially it is sometimes a little different, there are codes that only the manufacturers know about, and they ‘accidentally’ get leaked, but most cannot be changed.
I agree with panda that you want the salesperson to show you, with a foreign DVD that you bring along to the shop. And make sure you get a copy of the code in case you need to redo it. You will need to change it in the rare case of RCE discs.
I might not know about vegemite, but I know a bit about DVD players.
I have heard about that licensing aspect actually - which is why given that instruction manual, I didn’t believe it would work multi-region straight out of the box, which it did. No codes, nothing. Now, they could hypothetically have gone through and adjusted all of them beforehand, but it was interesting that when I checked the English section of the instruction book much later, it said that the player could only play region 4 (Australia/NZ), so you could see them skirting the legal aspects in both countries
Incidentally, I thought you could get a license to legally manufacture mult-region, only that it was much more expensive. Not 100% certain though.
I can’t manually set the region on mine, so I don’t know if it’ll work with RCE, but that aspect doesn’t really bother me. I hear that in a number of players you can get around it by simply playing a (non-RCE) region one disc briefly beforehand - an easy thing to try, anyway.
DVDs cost 8RMB (about $US1) in Shanghai - Multi-region is not an an issue - Many great movies are available before US release. The Chinese subtitles are a little rough sometimes - can make a serious movie into a comedy. They play fine on my Taiwan DVD player too - maybe the DVDs have no region information???
I hate region 3 DVDs. in order to put all the subtitles on it they have to sacrifice something. Sometimes it is sound quality, sometimes it is features. I noticed that it is harder to find region 1 DVDs nowadays.
[quote=“Richardm”]I got a all region player at Costco. It’s Daewoo.
I hate region 3 DVDs. in order to put all the subtitles on it they have to sacrifice something. Sometimes it is sound quality, sometimes it is features. I noticed that it is harder to find region 1 DVDs nowadays.[/quote]I’ve never heard of something being sacrificed to make room for subtitles (doesn’t mean it’s never happened, but I’ll be surprised if it did), how much bitrate does a subtitle track use anyway ? Bugger all I guess compared to the video or audio. Look at Region 2, what do they have ? 14 or more different subtitle tracks ? I have heard of DTS tracks being left off to make room for foreign language tracks. Features are usually left off due to cheap stingy Taiwanese companies, licensing reasons, or big fat American companies thinking we don’t matter.
Rian: why would illegal pirated DVD’s be region encoded ?
Don’t worry because it also depends on the player or rather the modification. I have an Australian DVD player (now in Germany) which is modified and it plays RCE discs automatically, no need to set the region manually or insert another disc before that.
Some players/mods require the manual change though or you need to ‘trick’ them as described.
DVD releases of the major labels are near equal to the R1 release and the sacrifice is mostly by dropping something, e.g. Titan AE (R3) does not have the DTS 5.1 track to make space for the Asian subtitles.
However you may also find some films might be censored, like Once upon in America (R3). Some blurring has been added to certain scenes.
R1 here are not only difficult to find but also expensive, so I recommend to mailorder from e.g. www.dvdboxoffice.com (Canada) or other North-American based retailers.
Subtitles are usually 2-5 megabytes per language. Even assuming you have both traditional and simplified as is the usual case, that’s peanuts. If someone tries to claim this is the reason to cut other audio tracks, that’s BS. It’s more likely they cut features to add a dubbed audio track, or they tried to squeeze it down to 4.3gb to fit on a cheaper single layer disk.
I have heard about that licensing aspect actually - which is why given that instruction manual, I didn’t believe it would work multi-region straight out of the box, which it did. No codes, nothing. Now, they could hypothetically have gone through and adjusted all of them beforehand, but it was interesting that when I checked the English section of the instruction book much later, it said that the player could only play region 4 (Australia/NZ), so you could see them skirting the legal aspects in both countries 