Will USA Dvds play on my laptop?

shepthedog

Hey all

Hope u can give me some advice on this

I am currently over in the USA for next six months, I have my Irish laptop (Dell Inspiron 5160, 1yr old) with me.. My question is, will USA dvds play on my laptop? DVDs here are cheap as chips in the likes of Costco, WalMart etc..
I know USA DVDs are region specific but thought there might be a way to play on laptop.

Thanks

irlrobins

laptop should play them. You'll prob be allowed to change the region that the DVD drive is set to 5 times. After that it will lock to the last region you set it to.

It is possible to get around this limitation by using DVD Genie or flashing the firmware etc. Google should be able to point you to the right info source.

cython

There's also a program named "AnyDVD" which will run in the background and will enable you to play any region DVDs on your machine. I use it and it works prety good.

Tony H

you are better off using "AnyDVD" rather than flashing the firmware , as flashing the firmware (unless you really know what you are doing ) can sometimes kill a drive , or as irlrobins suggests just use one of your 5 allowed changes

irlrobins

fitzdragon wrote:

flashing the firmware ... can sometimes kill a drive ,

Yea forgot to mention that lil bit!

Makaveli

VLC will also bypass any region encoding and play the dvds, plus it will play almost all other video codecs.

Fenster

Sometimes?

Laguna

AnyDVD is the best solution, it's what I use and it's perfect...

Syth

I second VLC, it's a great DVD/movie player that will try to ignore all regions (and that annoying 'don't copy this DVD' bit at the start).

However it won't work on all drives. I have a Apple iBook G4 bought over the summer. VLC (or mplayer or xine) can't play DVDs from another region. Apparently newer DVD drives have the region encoded in firmware. I can't find firmware to fix my broken DVD drive, so I'm stuck with a disc playing device that plays some DVDs, as opposed to a DVD driver.

r3nu4l

Just wandered into the thread...Thanks for the tip on VLC and anyDVD, I will try both. My old Toshiba DVD player (standalone, not PC) was supposed to be multi-region but when I play region 1 DVDs they play like an old Buster Keaton movie (silent, black and white and skipping frames) so I will try playing them in my laptop from now on

BopNiblets

I use DVD Region and CSS Free, it's handy for ripping/backup too (bypassing copy protection).

sweno

Yip I've always used AnyDVD and its a great program. Also if you want to watch those DVD's on a normal standalone region 2 player here, just copy it, most copying programs will have region removal on as default

jor el

Has anyone actually ever killed a drive by flashing it? I've flashed several different drives loads of times with various firmwares and never had a problem. www.rpc1.org is the place to get region free firmwares usually.

derekphonic

Just for reference, and slightly off topic,

There are 2 issues wrt DVDs and crossing the pond. The first is PAL vs NTSC, and the second is regions (with US being 1 and Europe being 2).

Leaving the region issue aside, *allegedly* all standalone PAL DVD players can play PAL and NTSC. However, standalone NTSC DVD players play NTSC only. So a multiregion (technically called"region 0") PAL DVD will not play on an American DVD player, which is a pain in the ass. This is just in case anyone out there decides to write a multiregion DVD to play on a US DVD player. You'd think just 'cos it's multiregion it'd play everywhere. Uh uh! You have to make an NTSC multiregion DVD.

I know this 'cos it happened to me.:mad:

Obviously, this doesn't apply to PCs, just standalone players.

DP