I recently purchased a Philips DVD player that allowed me to play all region discs AND PAL DVds also...it has worked great with no complaints...but I do have a question.....

I just put my in my copy of the Columbia DVD title "NIGHT OF THE DEMON" which is a domestic, region 1 DVD that I have watched fine on my old player but now all the menus come up in another launguage... I haven't seen this with any other disc I have watched on this player...

Addendum- I've have tried several of my Columbia DVDs and they are coming up the same...a default setting of some sort with the DVDs themselves? And if I recode the player from no region to R1 they come up fine......

Some of the R1 Friends DVDs are also coded R2 for Japan and if my JVC player is set for region 2 I get screens with Japanese writing at the end of the episodes.

I would say that your disc is coded for more than R1. Maybe R4 or R2??

Dirk

I had the same thing with my Slaves of New York DVD. The menus all came up in Japanese and the Japanese subtitles were switched on automatically. I found it quite odd but it was just in my all region Philips player that it happened.

You must go to your default menu and select language options
Most DVD Players from the US are set on ENGLISH as default
On region free machines, the default might be AUTO/FOLLOW,
just change it to English.

Looked at my menu and don't see any options to change here...it's the 642 model from Philips.....

It should be as DirkUSA said, although the Friends DVDs are actually encoded for Regions 1, 2, 3 and 4!

If you have a player that changes regions automatically, and you put in a R1 that is also coded for other regions, then depending on what region it was set to previously, it may play the disk for that region.

Example:

- You watch a R3 DVD
- Your player sets itself to R3
- You then go to watch a R1 DVD
- The R1 DVD is also coded for R2, R3 and R4.
- Your player is already set to R3 so it plays the disk as if it were a R3 disk
- Any content conditional on region plays back with the R3 content

You can check this by putting in a 'pure' R1 disk first (i.e. one that is ONLY coded for R1), and then trying that Columbia TriStar title again. It should play back with the US English menus.

That didn't seem to work, although I'm not ENTIRELY sure the SpiderMan DVD I used was only a Region 1 DVD, although it came up in English just fine. I've only had my player in Region 1 and 0 Region mode. It doesn't seem to be ALL Columbia DVDs...MacKenna's Gold seemed to work fine, as does a 3 Stooges disc too. The problem been limited to 4 titles that I've tried...so far.

Its really not a big problem since switching regions on the player is about as simple as it gets...but it would be nice to leave it Region 0 mode and not do anything.