U.S. DVDs in London

January 4, 2009 5:24 AM

I'll be teaching a film class in London this summer and I'm wondering--will I be able to play my American DVDs on English DVD players? Since I suspect the answer is no, will it work if I play them through my IBM laptop and plug this into an English computer projector? Or will I simply have to buy all new DVDs in the English standard?
posted by quintno to Technology (16 answers total)

Playing them through a computer will work.

You will also find that Europe has many more "region-less" DVD players, which are players that have had the ability to detect what region the DVD is from. It would be rather easy to procure a region-less DVD player once you got to London.
posted by JakeWalker at 5:34 AM on January 4, 2009

Which are players that have had the ability to detect what region the DVD is from REMOVED, I should have said.
posted by JakeWalker at 5:34 AM on January 4, 2009

Most dvd players allow you to switch their region a fixed number of times--usually three in my experience. If you're going to only be playing US DVDs, you should be able to do this with your Region 2 DVD player.

Your laptop was presumably bought in the US, and it's DVD drive is then Region 1. R1 DVDs will continue to play on it, regardless of your physical location.

Also see DVD region code on Wikipedia.
posted by mohrr at 5:36 AM on January 4, 2009

You definitely don't need to buy all new DVDs! It's true your DVDs are zone 1 and the UK standard is zone 2 but the easiest thing for you would be to buy a multizone DVD player when you arrive in the UK. If you do decide to buy a single-zone player for some reason, though, you can still almost certainly dezone it. Take a look at http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks
posted by hazyjane at 5:36 AM on January 4, 2009

DVD players are insanely cheap these days. You could almost certainly pick up a multi-zone DVD player from eBay for £15 or so. Also it is possible that the DVD players at the college can be reprogrammed to become multi-region. Many players have a set of keystrokes that can be input via remote control to remove the region settings. Once you know the make and model of the DVD player you can look it up on the net and see if there is a region unlock hack for it.
posted by skylar at 5:45 AM on January 4, 2009

Its really easy to find a multi-region DVD player in London. The main street for electronics is called Tottenham Court Road near the tube station of the same name. I guess you would prefer to buy as cheap player as possible and this chain has 10 stores in London, Richer Sounds , and are cheap and helpful. They have a player for £25 at the moment
posted by bluefin at 5:50 AM on January 4, 2009

There are several programs that can rip your DVDs to a region-free format. AnyDVD is one.

You can buy 50 blank DVDs for about £10. You could burn them in the UK and throw them away when you're done, to avoid carrying dodgy DVDs through customs.
posted by mattn at 6:15 AM on January 4, 2009

Where are you teaching? Best bet is to get in touch with the technicians there and they'll be able to give you a full run down of equipment available and any workarounds you may have to do. I'll bet dollars to donut holes that they'll have dealt with this kind of situation before.

Depending on the number of DVDs you could rip them & convert them to a more flexible format (mp4, avi etc) that runs directly from your laptop (or external hard disk – 1 DVD = approx 6.5Gb so ). You would also have the advantage of being able to edit out clips – e.g. if you are focussing on particular scenes – to save you flipping through different chapters/disks.
posted by i_cola at 6:42 AM on January 4, 2009

If the DVDs will play on your laptop, you can use that to play them on a computer projector in the UK.

As with all lecturing, it's worth testing the laptop-to-projector connection in advance; we've all seen presentations where the presenter can't figure out how to get their laptop to work with the projector.
posted by Mike1024 at 7:11 AM on January 4, 2009

When talking about DVD regions, noone has mentioned a big issue: the UK and US video signal standards are completely different. The US uses NTSC, Europe uses PAL.

So it's not enough to be able to change the region code of a DVD player. It needs the ability to read both types of DVDs. Thankfully, region-free players are usually cheap and do usually read both formats and convert the signal digitally so you can view an NTSC R1 DVD in the UK on a player which outputs PAL. But if you are buying one you should check the specs first.

I live in the US and have no problem watching European R2 DVDs with the American version of such a player. Only problem is that such players aren't so quite common that Netflix is willing to carry R2 DVDs :)
posted by aguy at 8:55 AM on January 4, 2009

As long as your projector and laptop have dvi or vga you should be fine. If you try to use a "plain" video signal you might have a problem (PAL vs NTSC).
posted by O9scar at 9:52 AM on January 4, 2009

I've never seen a projector have problems displaying an NTSC signal. It doesn't mean it can't happen, though I'd be very suprised if it did.
posted by Magnakai at 11:47 AM on January 4, 2009

As has been mentioned above, this should be very easy to sort out. Contact me once you arrive if you have any problems. E-mail's in the profile.
posted by Optamystic at 1:44 PM on January 4, 2009

Less-than optimal advice on Tottenham Court Road as a source of electronics -- it's not a shadow of what it used to be. (There are a couple of reasonably big box-shifters near the station, and there's a PC WORLD up towards Euston Road, but most of the old pile'em'high'n'sell'em deep shops were priced out of the area a couple of years ago, and you'll do better looking for bargains on ebay.co.uk.)

To play multiregion DVDs on your (US) laptop, I'd recommend VLC media player -- cross-platform, multi-region, no messing around. (What others said about PAL/NTSC coding applies, of course.)
posted by cstross at 4:00 PM on January 4, 2009

for your laptop to work.

1. Get updated region free firmware for the dvd drive. (google for region free firmware and your drive info)
2. Run dvdregionkiller (google, it hasn't been updated since 2004 or so, but still works fine)

for a dvd player to work

1. Assuming it can read NTSC, and the TV can accept an NTSC signal.

You can once again google the DVD player model number and region free, usually it's a simple code you enter into the dvd to get into a maintenance menu, from there you can set the region of the player to '0' or region free.

Me-mail me for any more help. I have moved across regions a couple of times, region restrictions are just something you have to bypass to enjoy stuff you paid for.
posted by defcom1 at 4:04 PM on January 4, 2009

Also, your university will have a multimedia/tech department. Most universities should also already have region-free DVD players in a closet somewhere that you can use. I would recommend making small, pathetic, sad little sounds in their direction--well in advance--and arrange for them to send a student aide to set everything up for you in whatever way they think makes the most sense.

Assuming this is an option and you do it, make sure you make arrangements and test the setup long enough in advance that problems can be fixed prior to when you actually need to show the film. If you wait until the day of, things will always go badly. They won't have a cable, or the kid who comes to help you will be even more clueless than you are, etc.
posted by Number Used Once at 4:21 PM on January 4, 2009