greekboy

Yesterday, I found out that I could make my Aiwa DVD player region free and went on a shopping spree at amazon.uk. Little did I know about needing a Pal to NTSC conversion in order to watch these DVD's. Now I have no idea what to do. Is there anything that will let me do this conversion for a reasonable price. I checked Ebay and everything was about $300.00.

J-Dubya

I think some dvd players can be hacked to convert PAL to NTSC. Apex perhaps? They play a fullscreen version of PAL but better than none at all. Or you can buy your reg 2 dvds from Japan as they are all in NTSC format already!

lostatmidnight

The Emerson EVC-1595 digital converter was running at $275 by a vendor on Yahoo! shopping about 2 weeks ago....The sale may be over, but its worth a shot to check....JosephWV is right there are some great dvd's to import from Japan.(I'd cancel that order at Amazon )

greekboy

Thanks alot for the help guys

lord kodak

ever thought of getting a new dvd player with, an ntsc to pal/pal to ntsc feature built in, it may work out to be cheaper. and theres less cableing to sort out.

also if your current dvd player, has only been remote hacked to play the diffrent regions then does it play dvd's with rce feature, if not then it may be to ur advantage to buy a new dvd player.

gerrytwo

The old Apex AD-600A DVD player I have can handle the PAL to NTSC conversion, with a catch. The conversion, especially on 16:9 DVDs, is adequate but imperfect. You can go to nerd-out.com for postings on the newer Apex models. Even after you have a setup that plays PAL DVDs, you may have a problem with Columbia European DVDs. I have to turn the chapter setting to off to play the one Columbia PAL DVD I have. HKL DVDs play fine, with no major conversion problems that I have noticed.

Seagraves

Do those Japanese DVDs work in R1 players? I have a R3 CTHD and it plays in my player fine. I read that it's because it's in NTSC. If that's true, why wouldn't the japanese ones work?

gerrytwo

The R3 CTSD from Columbia TRiStar won't work in R1 players. You may have one of the R0 versions distributed by Malaysian or other duplicators. There were plenty of postings in March about whether these versions were unauthorized copies.
Japanese DVDs are R3 and use the NTSC standard. Some Japanese releases on Universe and Ocean Shores are R0. Lately, Universe seems to be releasing mostly R3 versions of Japanese movies. Korean companies like Daum have Korean rights to some Japnese movies, like Samurai Fiction, which they sell much cheaper and in NTSC. Unless you get information from a reliable source, figure the Korean distributor has to release the Japanese movie with region coding.

Hendrik

"...Japanese DVDs are R3..."

No, they are not! Japan is Region 2 - and, yes, NTSC.

Hong Kong is Region 3 and, also, NTSC.

Most (but not all!) Hong Kong DVDs are Region '0' (zero), a.k.a. Region 'ALL' - all Hong Kong DVDs are NTSC.

The following OCEAN SHORES discs of Japanese movies, recently added to my DVD 'collection', are Region 3:

Another Heaven (surprisingly, an anamorphic transfer!) / Audition / The Exam / Uzumaki

...while these titles are Region ALL:

Gohatto / To Love / Tomie

All those discs are NTSC.

I believe the Japanese don't make Region 0 (ALL) DVDs, at least I've never heard of or seen one.

http://www.laserrot.com/info/lrinfo/dvdmap.html

Note: Any country, regardless of the 'Region' it's in, can make 'Region 0' DVDs - many do: in the US, a goodly number of Criterion DVDs are Region 0, as are many DVDs on the image label, all 'Adult' titles, DVDs released by the Roan
group, Troma titles, etc.

Q.E.D.

. . .

Playitagainsam

that sucks!

you should consider getting a computer with a DVD drive and a TV-out card... this system will play anything you put in it, on NTSC TV's...

Matt Stevens

Hollywood Plus card will do it, but with stuttering that is difficult to get rid of. However, the ATI RADEON 32mb with S-Video out will do it without stuttering (just found this out for myself). What you need is 450mhz PIII or better and at least 192mb of Ram.

You can build a HTPC like this for just $350. It's ten times better than the APEX/SAMPO type DVD players. Just be sure you are running Win98SE or ME with no apps running in the background.

mdX

the problem with using the s-video output of the radeon is that it's really not up to par (quality wise) with the output of a hollywood plus card. I was thinking of using my HTPC as a region free solution but broke down and got a region-free pioneer 343 instead