On 10/05/12 21:19, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Thu, 10 May 2012 18:14:53 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:
Can someone explain this to me? Is there a code to enter to allow the
machine to play other regions?

There often is (but not always). When I buy things like that, I Google
them first with the keyword 'hack' or similar to find out if it's
possible to enable multi-region.

Related question; UK PAL is what, 625 lines @ 50fps, and US NTSC is 525
lines @ 60fps - so as well as being unlocked, does the DVD player also
have to be capable of scaling and compensating for different frame sizes
and rates on the fly?

Or is the number of lines and frame rate constant on the DVD regardless
of region (i.e. there's a global standard), and so all the player ever
has to worry about is converting between "DVD lines/fps" standard to
whatever its native format is (e.g. PAL, NTSC) for the region where it
was sold, regardless of what region the DVD being played is for?

(I bought a DVD player in the UK circa 1998 - that one required soldering
a surface-mount IC along with a few bridge wires in order to defeat the
region encoding; soon after that, entering a code via the remote became
more common)

cheers

Jules
Frames/lines are not constant. Some DVD players do frame conversion, but
IME it's crap. You need a TV which will do PAL 60 and a player that will
output NTSC as PAL60, or a NTSC compatible TV. Most TVs now will handle
PAL60 ok. Back in 1998, I had a TV that wouldn't, and the first R1 DVD I
bought looked terrible- The frame rate conversion just dropped some frames.