On Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 03:08 PM, Marta Edie inquired: > Hello there - all you DVD players. Does the iMac ( 10.2.8) play DVDs > burnt in the Pal system (European)?
It should. I don't have one handy to test with. My cheap Apex DVD player will handle both PAL and NTSC, although the NTSC has a clearer picture on my NTSC television because it doesn't have to convert the scan rate on the fly. > Also, as I understand it : if I burn a DVD here, it is automatically > burned for our region which is region1 I believe. If I want someone to > play it in Europe, which I believe is region2, can I do that? Any software you're likely to use (iDVD, Toast) will create region-free DVDs. It's only the commercial DVDs that have region codes. Most DVD players sold in Europe will play both NTSC and PAL disks on a PAL TV, although the NTSC disks don't look as good because of the translation to PAL and because PAL is a better quality system to start with. (Many sold in the US aren't so versatile.) As a courtesy to the person to whom you are sending the disk, you could tell iDVD to master the project in PAL format. > Some time ago, when I burned my first DVD, the pull down menu told me > something like I can do this 5 times,( that is switching back and > forth) but I really don't remember the details. Anybody have an > answer? You were probably setting the region code on your DVD-RW drive. This can only be done a few times because of stupid cooperation with the media conglomerates. There are three solutions I know of for this problem: (1) Download a ROM hack for your drive to make it region-free. This is a bit dangerous and you probably don't want to do this. Hacks are available for most of the drives out there. (2) Use VLC instead of Apple's DVD player to watch your DVDs. It bypasses the region check and can play DVD's from any region. Best of all, it's free! (3) Buy a cheap Apex DVD player with the "secret" key codes to turn off the region coding. This is what I did. (You can also turn off the MacroVision copy prevention fuzzing with a "secret" key code, in order to make decent quality tapes of commercial DVDs.) | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be October 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
