Am I naive...

[ffutures]

...in thinking that an American who buys a DVD that has the following in its eBay description

"This is a Region 2 (Britain and Europe) DVD - overseas bidders,
please make sure that your DVD player can handle this format!"

should not be surprised if their player can't handle it? Here's the email I got this morning:

I purchased a DVD from you on Ebay back on April 19th, Item #xxxxxxxx, and I just put it in for my daughter but we seem to be having some problems getting it to play. Normally when we insert a DVD it boots right up, however when we put in Robots it displays a message that says "Out of Area Restrictions, Programming Prohibited". Does this mean anything to you? I've never seen this message before and was wondering if it had anything to do with the DVD coming from the UK, is there a setting on the DVD player I might need to adjust? Any assistance would be appreciated.

I know I don't have to do anything after this amount of time, but since they were reasonably polite about it I've explained about region coding, hack codes, Videolan, etc. and offered to refund the price (but not postage) if they get it back to me. Hopefully they'll sell it locally insted, or see if they can region-hack their player. But I can't help thinking that if I saw that warning I'd at least make some attempt to find out what it meant!

Update: They've decided to chalk it up to experience and don't want to send it back for a refund, which seems fair enough to me. Given the miniscule amount they paid for it and the cost of posting it back I'm not entirely surprised.

Comments

[lawbag.livejournal.com]

what the poor Americans dont realise is that Region 1 gets it before we do, so the concept of a DVD which doesnt work on their machine is alien to them.

buyer beware - more fool them.

[ouatic-7.livejournal.com]

That only applies to Hollywood output. If you want Asian stuff, as I did, you have to wait years and then it is often horribly mangled ("character development? you don't need no stinkin' character development!) with no sub available.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

Even some Hollywood productions are available in the UK before they're available here. The Buffy DVDs were available in Britain long before they became available in North America.

[ouatic-7.livejournal.com]

too true which is why we have a bunch of PAL DVDs to unload.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Anything interesting?

[ouatic-7.livejournal.com]

Only Buffy. The more exotic stuff, like Tears of the Black Tiger I'm holding on to.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Fair enough - needless to say I have all the Buffy DVDs.

[ouatic-7.livejournal.com]

That was a given.

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

I was talking to an American who was living in England - and he said most Americans genuinly have no idea there are regions. They don't think of themselves as living in a Region - that's the rest of the world.....

...but yes your note was clear and you'd think people would look into it.

[elementalv.livejournal.com]

Most of the Americans *I* know are fully aware of region encoding and bitch mightily about it, particularly when there's a British or other European movie they want that isn't available for sale in the U.S.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Looks like not everyone shares your knowledge.

[elementalv.livejournal.com]

Yeah. The point I was trying (and failed) to make is that not everyone shares the ignorance of the other American's acquaintances. Gross generalizations make my teeth itch.

[frandowdsofa.livejournal.com]

But your note referred to "overseas" bidders, and obviously that isn't them, it's everybody who isn't in America.

[jonnynexus.livejournal.com]

I think that's it. They probably assumed that you were American.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Ebay does show item location on the listing - maybe they somehow missed noticing it. And from their message they did notice that it was British.

[jonnynexus.livejournal.com]

Good point. Although maybe they didn't notice that when they ordered... or perhaps even though they knew that you weren't American, they still think that non-Americans will use the word "overseas" to refer to places outside America.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

That might be it.

I remember when I ran a paper RPG materials swap for Traveller. Very simple: send me some original material in a SASE, and I'd send you a similar amount back. I live in Canada, and I'd asked foreign fans to enclose International Reply Coupons rather than stamping the envelope. Over half the Americans used American stamps -- apparently because _they_ weren't foreign. (According to one chap, "foreign" meant "non-American" -- he had no concept that Americans were foreigners in Canada.)

[elementalv.livejournal.com]

Their computer should be able to play it.

[ouatic-7.livejournal.com]

My computer won't play Pal disks. And, though this clearly doesn't apply to these people, unless you hack it, the DVD drive will select a region code after five disks, or so I understand.

[elementalv.livejournal.com]

Always possible, though I know Macs and PCs in the States will play Region 3 DVDs at the very least. Also, I've heard that about PC limitation, don't know if it's true of Macs. But if the buyer wants to at least show the daughter the film before sending it back, this might be one way of doing so.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

Macs will let you change the region code five times, after which you're stuck. If I keep travelling to China, I'll have to learn how to hack this.

And yes, I've bitched about this to Apple.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Have you tried resetting the PMU?

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

Um, what?

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Power Manager Unit. Send me an e-mail (heliographinc@gmail.com) with what type of Mac you have and I can send you the instructions. Dunno if it'll work, but it resets all the hardware settings for the rest of the machine.

[ouatic-7.livejournal.com]

I use some Chinese software for my Windows PC called DVD Region Free. It works a treat. They don't appear to have a Mac version but perhaps there is something similar.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Try videolan, from www.videolan.org and available for most platforms including mac, linux, windows, etc. It'll play DVDs from any region withot any need to change the computer's region coding.

[ouatic-7.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the suggestion. Next time I need to do a screen cap, I'll remember it.

[doctor-toc.livejournal.com]

Ooh, seconded. I love videolan.

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Americans have two problems with Euro DVD's, in my experience. First it is the region coding, but that's relatively simple and there are lots of hacks.

Worse is that their TV's run on NTSC settings, but ours are PAL. It is very common for PAL hardware - TVs and DVDs - to be able to run NTSC discs - but more uncommon for NTSC hardware to handle PAL discs.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that the actual disk content was coded identically, but maybe I've got that wrong. And there are programs that'll rip a DVD of any region to region 0, which everything should play correctly.

[pompe.livejournal.com]

The regional coding is different from the PAL/NTSC issue. Region coding is just a single byte of data on the disc IIRC, but a disc which is Region :All (or "0") is still PAL or NTSC. Usually that stands below or above the region number on the back side of the disc cover. So it can say ALL:NTSC. Just as most of my UK / Scando discs say "2:PAL"

The NTSC/PAL difference affect how the video is formatted to the disc, and as PAL has higher resolution a PAL movie takes up more space than an NTSC movie.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OIC - thanks.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

My $30 all-region Chinese DVD player lets me select the output.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Same here with two of the three DVD players (as distinct from drives) I've owned - the third is built into a TV set and outputs whatever that is set to, which can be PAL 50 / 60 or NTSC. But I know that some of the players and TVs sold to the US market are severely crippled.

[ckd]

Most are, alas. There are exceptions; at least one Philips model will do NTSC/PAL and can be de-regionated with a remote control code.

One (not as expensive as it used to be) trick is to buy multiple cheap DVD-ROM drives, put them in a computer with a tower case, and use each for a different region (since RPC-2 drives store the region code in the drive itself). That also lets the computer handle the PAL/NTSC issue....