Hello,
I’ve heard that American DVD’s can’t be played on European players. Is this true with CD’s as well?
If so, how would an American adjust a CD so that Europeans can play it on their players?
Thank you,
Ms. Cosby Gibson
New York State
Hello,
I’ve heard that American DVD’s can’t be played on European players. Is this true with CD’s as well?
If so, how would an American adjust a CD so that Europeans can play it on their players?
Thank you,
Ms. Cosby Gibson
New York State
Cosby,
No, CDs are fine - it’s just that with DVDs the studios decided to get “clever” and restrict DVDs to play only in certain regions, so that they could control releases. Each DVD has a region code written in it (1 for the US, 2 for Europe etc - and some have Region Code 0 which will play anywhere).
Since this is implemented in hardware/software it can normally be subverted relatively easily - most DVD players can be reset/hacked to be “regionless” i.e. to play all DVDs (though I do have one DVD that will only play if I temporarily reset my DVD player to Region-1).
The hacking/resetting is normally done with a complex set of various buttons on the remote control (and you may get a “scary” message on scrren that says something like “You should not be here” - ignore that. The hack for any particular DVD player can normally easily be found with a quick search on t’interweb. Many shops will sell you a DVD player with the box already set regionless.
WC
Thank you, that is good news! I sent one of my CD’s to the Netherlands and then heard there might be problems.
I appreciate your response.
Just an update: the CD I sent to the Nethterlands worked just fine. Thank you so much for your valuable help.