Converting foreign DVDs to US format?

[Matt Crunk]

After years of searching I finally found the second season of Showtime's Fallen Angels (six classic noirs told for television) released on DVD. The only problem is it was only released in Australia on PAL format DVD, which as I understand will not play on standard US DVD players.

Anyone know if it will play on US computers? Or if not, is there any inexpensive PC sofware that will play and possibly convert and burn it to US format DVD?

 

[Mike in Seattle]

Most computer CD and DVD drives let you change the region somewhere between 4-6 times before it locks down the drive. Check the properties for the DVD drive in your computer. If you're going to buy a foreign DVD, I think I'd immediately copy the DVD to the hard drive, then change the DVD region code back to US and then burn the file to DVD. There are loads of programs out there that let you make "backup" and "archival" copies of commercial DVD's. We did that years ago when a series I really wanted was only available in Great Britain and they said they'd never release it to the US...and of course, about the time we got a copy made, the announced a US release.

 

[Smithy]

I'd imagine it's the same in the States...

Back home in NZ when we bought our last telly and DVD player and we have brought and use them here, we picked a multi-zone DVD player and telly able to do both PAL and NTSC. Means we can watch whatever we want DVD-wise.

 

[Shaul-Ike Cohen]

Another question is zones. There is even free software that removes the zone encoding, but it might be illegal in your country or state, because technically you make a copy of the DVD.

Apart from that, there are zone-free DVD players (again: check legality), but they identify as "zone 0". This works for most DVDs of any zone encoding, but some newer DVDs won't play on a zone-0. Unfortunately, this includes a lot of new DVDs even when the film itself is old. Mostly a problem with Warner and zone 1 (US), don't know about Australian ones.

 

[Miss Neecerie]

and you can change the zone on quite a few dvd players....

Mine is a 29 dollar one....and it took me a few minutes to manage to switch it to region 0, so it now plays anything.

 

[Shaul-Ike Cohen]

and you can change the zone on quite a few dvd players....

Mine is a 29 dollar one....and it took me a few minutes to manage to switch it to region 0, so it now plays anything.

As I said, be careful, because many newer US DVDs with RCE (regional code enhancing) won't play on a region-0 player.

 

[Miss Neecerie]

As I said, be careful, because many newer US DVDs with RCE (regional code enhancing) won't play on a region-0 player.

This is true, but unlike the computer based players....changing mine -back- to 1.....is a 5 min or less job....rather like those odd keypresses people do on playstation or the like....to reach secret areas...

 

[Absinthe_1900]

A lot of players listed here:

http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks

 

[Mahagonny Bill]

Of course, once you get past the Region lock, you still need to convert the video from PAL to NTSC if you want to play it on your regular TV. If you have a region free player it may do the PAL/NTSC conversion for you, but if are transferring the disk via computer to play on an NTSC set-top box you will need to convert the video yourself.

If you are using a Linux based system, you should check-out TOVID which is a free open source video conversion tool. It's a little difficult to set-up, but once you have it going you can convert a PAL DVD to NTSC in short order.

If your not using a Linux based system, this might be a good excuse to set one up .