I bought a dvd off ebay without noticing that it was coming from austrailia therefore i cannot play it in any of my dvd players. Is it possible to copy that disk but change the region on the burned one so it will play in US encoded players? I am not too sure on all this stuff. Thanks for your help!!
There are a number of potential hurdles to get over. Since this disk does not have the same region coding as the DVD-ROM (the burner)in the PC, the burner will offer to change to the same coding as the disk. The problem with this is that you can only change the coding four or five times then it's set permanently at the last region you selected - too bad if it's not Region 1 (North America). The next problem is that Australia (I assume the DVD was produced for the Australian market) uses PAL video coding - North America uses NTSC. While the disk would play in the PC (assuming the region code was changed on the burner) it would still not play on the standalone - unless the standalone accepted PAL video (DVD movies or DivX files). There may be firmware available to permanently change the burner to make it region free - but flashing hacked firmware is always a gamble. You have the option then of accepting a region change on the burner (and changing it back to region 1 later) and ripping the disk to the hard drive. Rip it to the hard drive using 'DVDFAB HD Decrypter'. If you don't want to get into changing region coding on the burner 'ANY DVD' will allow you to rip the disk without changing the region coding. Run 'ANY DVD' in the background, insert the disk, then rip it to the hard drive using 'DVDFAB HD Decrypter'. ANY DVD is not free, but has a functional trial period that may be all you need. After the disk has been ripped it has to be shrunk to fit a standard DVD (OTOH, you could rip it and burn it to a DL disk instead - no shrinking required). The files from the rip would be loaded into DVD Shrink and the output saved to a new folder. Before it can be burned to the new disk, the movie has to be converted from PAL to NTSC format - unless you know that your standalone will play PAL disks. Converting from PAL to NTSC means that you lose the Menu that came on the original disk - you still have subtitles and extras, etc. If you have NERO installed on the PC, you can use Nero Vision to convert the PAL files to NTSC and burn the output to disk. If you don't have Nero, then other methods (free and otherwise) are available Sorry it's long winded, but I tried to cover all the potential problems. http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVDFab_Decrypter http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvd.html http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/dvd_rippers/dvd_shrink.cfm
Thank you very much for your information!!! To be honest its mostly over my head but I do understand what I am up against now. At this point I am going to pass your info to a friend who knows what their doing when it comes to this stuff. Again thank you for the detailed instructions!!!!
