Need help with a region free dvd player.

[matthewmalay]

Lots of DVD players can play both PAL and NTSC, the problem is that can your TV handle a PAL signal, even so you shouldn't be getting a wrong region message, the DVD should load but your picture will just be completely messed up but if it won't play PAL DVDs at all and they said it could try to get your money back. My guess is that they made a speciifc firmware version for North America and doesn't allow it to play PAL DVDs at all. The same thing happened with my Panasonic DVD player, it can play PAL VCDs (the image is a little scretched and cut off vertically, I'm guessing because PAL has more vertical lines than NTSC but PAL mpeg2 video DVDs don't work at all on it) but when I tried to take a bunch of PAL VCDs and put them together and author them together on a video DVD,I didn't re-encode the video or nothing, it wouldn't play without me having to mess around with the ifo files and trick it to work.

I bought this real cheapo DVD player, came region free out of the box and has a PAL to NTSC converter, not the greatest of players and the control really suck but a good spare player to have around.
http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddet...wdeptid=11

I also bought a Philips DVP 642 for 100$CDN, made region free with a simple remote hack and also has a PAL to NTSC converter and it can play DivX/Xvid avi files