New DVD box set won't play o DVD player but plays fine on my PC. Why?

December 26, 2008 7:02 PM

New DVD box set (the Flintstones!). It won't play on my DVD player ("Incompatible disc") but plays fine on my PC. Why?

Should I take them back? Are they bad? (I threw out the receipt, argh). I realize I can just copy them to DVD-Rs but I'm concerned that my DVD player is possibly dumb and/or outdated although it doesn't have these issues in general and I am loathe to replace it just to watch the Flintstones.

posted by GuyZero to technology (7 comments total)

Read the back of the box -- what region is the DVD?

(Your dvd player is probably region locked -- your profile says CA so I'm guessing region 1 -- your computer dvd is possibly unlocked).
posted by devbrain at 7:37 PM on December 26, 2008

Might help if you listed the brand and model of your DVD player.
posted by lore at 8:16 PM on December 26, 2008

Region 1 DVD on an RCA player (I'll go look up m&m later) that's been region unlocked. It plays most region 1 discs fine and has played one region 2 disc without any issues. I'll report back w. make & model.
posted by GuyZero at 8:52 PM on December 26, 2008

If its been "Region Unlocked" this more than likely means you set the region to ZERO. This used to mean that it would play any region discs, but many studios fought back by changing the disc to play on region 1 ONLY, as opposed to region 0 or 1.

Go into your RCA region setting and change it to one. I bet that does the trick.
posted by crazyray at 10:44 AM on December 27, 2008

Here's how to change the Region to 1 on many RCA players:

To check the current setting:
open tray, clear, 1,3,7,9

To change the current setting to "1"
open tray, clear, 1,3,6,9,1, turn off, turn on
posted by crazyray at 10:47 AM on December 27, 2008

To check the current setting on newer RCA players, hit [setup], 1 , 3, 7, 9
posted by crazyray at 10:50 AM on December 27, 2008

As a followup, upon copying these to DVD+Rs, the discs do have RCE - some sort of regional coding thing that prevents them from playing on region-free players. Even resetting my DVD player to region 1 did not seem to solve the issue though.
posted by GuyZero at 12:16 PM on January 10