HW: Re: BOC-L Digest / Still in the Shadows

[Henderson Keith]

Jonathan laments...

>I thank the two people who replied saying that the PAL "Out of the
>Shadows" should play on my NTSC player. Unfortunately it doesn't; nor
>does it on my sister-in-law's or her son's...<snip>

I'm no expert on this (to say the least), but I will offer two things
that have just come to mind on the subject.

One is, that somewhere I read that many 'cheap' DVD players in the US
have the capability to play DVDs from Europe because they contain
"one-chip-fits-all" processors in them.  Or something.  Whereas higher
quality DVD players sometimes have individually-designed chips only
containing the capability that *that* particular model has, as advertised.
(I can't remember where I read that...I thought maybe it was even here,
but I guess not.)

The other, is that my nephew in Chicago managed to find on the internet
a simple sequence of buttons to push, in order to make his otherwise-
PAL-intolerable NTSC-DVD player accept PAL discs and play them without
distortion or anything.  I think he just searched for his model and
make and 'hacking' instructions, and found the sequence without a
problem.  At first I didn't believe him, but he sent solid evidence to
indicate it was the truth.

Putting these two bits of information together, perhaps your (or other's)
DVD player *does* have the capability to accept PAL DVDs, but just needs
to be 'hacked' in order to make it happen.  If indeed it contains one
of these all-purpose chips inside.  Try a search and see...

Grakkl (FAA)

P.S. Interesting about the '95% of PAL-DVD players will accept NTSC.'
I guess mine does, as I have one or two NTSC discs that do play, but
I thought that was because the discs were 'special' duel format ones.
Maybe no such thing exists, after all?  I dunno...I've been trying to
figure out this whole thing for six years, without success.  Even though
many people have forwarded lots of very detailed, seemingly complete
explanations.  Perhaps I just don't get it.  :)

I've got some CD-video things that *don't* play on it, though.  I guess
this CD-V idea is already dying out, as I think the data density was
quite low such that a normal sized disc only held about 25 minutes or
so of audio/video, so I guess it's not so important an issue.