As was inevitable, after having my region free daewoo DVD player stolen, I've aquired my first non region 1 DVD that I'd like to watch. (Forklift Safety. On DVD. What a great christmas present.) So, it's time to replace my dvd player, and I've decided that what I really want is a name brand one that's region free. I'm tired of Apex/Daewoo remotes that can't be replaced by universal ones. I'm tired of blue lines showing up on the screen while I'm watching a movie for no reason. The problem is I've never run into information about a high quality DVD player that can be made region free. I'd like to spend about $125, but if the right one came along, I'll pay more.

Matthew

What model was your Daewoo?

Wow. In the UK, almost any DVD player by any manufacturer can be made multi-region, and most decent stores, online or highstreet, will sell you a chipped or otherwise modified version of pretty much any DVD player, with a full warranty.

I guess this is different in the US, as no-one in the mighty US of A would want to play inferior foreign DVDs

Might be worth finding a common US DVD player model from Sony or similar and see if there is any info on the 'net on whether it can be made multi-region. It might just be the case that mods aren't made such a big thing of over there.

I used to have a Daewoo 9000N, it was about a year old, and did everything it should have except every once in a while it would get a series of blue lines accross the screen which wouldn't go away until you paueed and restarted it. It didn't happen often enough for me to worry about it too much. I'd buy another one if it had discrete codes and was supported by universal remotes.

Here in the US, very few people worry about dvd regions. It's a big place, and most things are available. The ones that are well known for being hackable are the cheap chinese DVD players. Our electronic retailers are usualy large chains, so they'd be fairly easy to target it they started advertising region free dvd players.

Matthew

I bought a Norcent at Walmart recently to compliment my otherwise very capable Toshiba. Works fine. New DVD players are very simple devices. Most of them are using your run of the mill DVD-ROM drive internally. With a molex power connector and an IDE ribbon cable. This DVD player is made by a large Chinese company also manufacturing a number of other units under different trade names. Region-free setting, specific region setting, PAL and NTSC playback with conversion. Macrovision can also be disabled (I don't care about that though). It can play back VCD, SVCD, MP3 CDRs, JPG CDRs, and a few othr things. Not bad for $90 Canadian.

If you want a better quality unit, get one from the UK s long as it can handle NTSC output.

Bruno

To check if a particular DVD player is region free, you could try this page.

Stig