Audacity Forum

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.