Expert: Stephen Campbell - 10/5/2009

Question
I have been sent a DVD by an American friend who is living in Borneo.  It does not work on my English DVD player which is made by Loewe.  Is there any way this can be remedied?

Your advice would be much appreciated.

Answer
Hi Jill,

Your DVD player is Region 2. The DVD you have is Region 1. To cut a long story short, Region 2 machines cannot play Region 1 DVDs. Now there are a couple of ways around it.

Firsty, you could buy a mutliregion DVD player! (which probably isn't the best solution)

Secondly, if you have a PC or laptop that plays DVDs, you can download a programme called VLC, which is a multiregion media player and no matter what region your machine, it'll play any DVDs from any region. You can get it here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Thirdly, you could hack your own DVD player. Now, if you're lucky, you'll be able to use a remote control hack, but if you're unlucky you may have to physically open the machine. To find out, put in the exact name and model of your DVD player into Google as a phrase, and also search for "multiregion hack"; so type it exactly like this: "Loewe XXX-XXX-XXX" "multiregion hack". You should come up with results pretty quick. There are a lot of universal remote hackers available on places like Ebay, and they'll have a list of players they work on. If you're having problems tracking it down though, you could get back to me and I'll see what I can find.

And that's about all I can tell you at this point. You could also try contacting the techie guys here: http://www.allexperts.com/el/1749-9/TV-VCR-Stereo

or here:

http://www.allexperts.com/el/2859-9/Home-Theater

But they'll most likely tell you the same thing I did.

Best of luck,
Stephen.