Bill Grumbine wrote:
Alun, I don't understand the coding thing, and I am pretty sure it is more
of a NTSC vs PALS thing than anything else. I am just the pretty face on
the camera, and have little to do with the technical end. ;-) I can tell
you that there are a number of your countrymen who have purchased and viewed
the first one successfully.

It's got absolutely nothing to do with NTSC vs. PAL at all, since most
TV's over here are either capable of displaying an NTSC signal as well
as PAL, or the DVD player can do the conversion.

The region coding thing was originally designed so that the big movie
studios can progressively release their wares across different regions
of the world, i.e. they can release a movie to region 1 (northern
america) before region 2 (europe), because in theory a DVD player bought
in Europe can only play region 2 or region 0 (region free) DVD's.

This isn't probably such a big deal on your side of the pond, since
everything gets released there first, but over here there are people who
like to get their hands on movies as soon as they're released, so most
people to whom that matters get their DVD players unlocked. Sometimes
that's dead easy and can be done purely in software by entering some
"secret code", on others it's more complicated and needs hardware mods.
Those people will already have made their players region free, but many
non technical folks, I guess won't have, so you're possibly restricting
your potential audience for no good reason.

Now, as I said, there's absolutely no reason at all why the guy that
does all your DVD production can't simply make the DVD region free (also
known as region 0), which means that it'll play everywhere ... US,
Europe, Asia, the moon, or wherever. Maybe you could just ask him.

--
Alun Saunders