Region coding and DVDs

[Barry Ten]

A friend of mine recently bought seasons 1-6 of Better Call Saul on DVD. He had some trouble playing the last disk of Season 6 and

asked me to look at it in my own device, a 13 year old Samsung Blu-ray player. It did play in my box, albeit a bit noisily and with some clunkiness with regard to returning to the menus, but otherwise seems OK. I've not watched it in its entirety as I don't want to spoil the ending of the series for myself.

 

But it appears to be (along with the other 5 seasons) to be a North American/Canadian DVD, so I'm surprised that he or I were able to play it at all. I've never tried unlocking the region lock on my player so I'm puzzled as to what's going on here. Can anyone shed any light? Did they just quietly turn off the region locking on players and not tell anyone?

[Coldgunner]

I think region coding died out on players years ago, especially with tools like DVD Decryptor that will strip the protections from the files. I've archived a few favourite discs in a similar way for accessibility.

Quite a number of modern players are either region 0 or have a remote code to change the reqions. Blu Ray players are going much the same way. I suspect its cheaper to manufacture one device that having varying SKU's to output.

[kevinlms]

If 6 DVD's are from a boxed set and only the last one has trouble, that indicates a fault with that disc. If it's new send it back.

[BR60103]

I have trouble with the DVDs included with a certain magazine which are set to Britain and my DVD player will not play them.

I have a laptop Blueray player that will play them, but that's too small.

 

[Reorte]

12 hours ago, BR60103 said:

I have trouble with the DVDs included with a certain magazine which are set to Britain and my DVD player will not play them.

I have a laptop Blueray player that will play them, but that's too small.

Plug the laptop in to the TV, with a bit of luck it might just be a case of plugging an HDMI cable between them.

[BR60103]

Thanks. I tried that a while ago but I think the socket on the TV is damaged because it wouldn't hold or connect.  ☹️

[DavidB-AU]

It might be worth checking if season 6 is NTSC or PAL. As best I can work out that series is available in region 1 NTSC and region 0 PAL.

 

My first DVD player had the region set by hardware using a DIP switch inside. It was easy to open the case set it to play all regions, although that would have voided the warranty.

 

My second DVD player, now around 15 years old but still working, has the region set by software. After only a few minutes of searching I found a service manual online which included instructions for a technician to change the region using the remote control.