Hi there, Does anybody know of a North American DVD player that can play both CDRs (home made MPEG-1 VCD) and Multi-Region disks, particularly region 2 and region 0?

Kind regards,

Richard.

-- Richard Landon (ramj@pacificcoast.net), July 13, 2001

Answers

The following players, sold in Region 1, have good CD-R support and can be made to play multi-region discs: Apex, Sampo and Afreey. There are others, but I know these are sold in North America. Just a warning - you may have to get firmware patches on the Internet and do your own firmware patching to get the players to play in multi-region mode, but they will support CD-R out of the box as is. Many of these players used to allow you to turn off region checking or set the region to any desired value, but the MPAA threatened legal action and made them remove that option. Search on the Internet for these players and you'll find web sites with lots of info on patching the firmware. You should be aware that if you don't correctly identify your firmware before patching it, you will ruin your player. I have patched an Apex AD-703 and it works fine, but you will have to break a warranty sticker on the back of the unit to open it up and see the firmware revision you have and this voids your warranty. The Apex in particular has had a lot of quality control issues, so you might want to get a Sampo or Afreey. Older Sampo players are available on the internet that contained the older firmware that supported multi-region mode and you won't have to patch them. The last I heard, the Afreey still supported multi-region out of the box, but I can't give you 100% guarantee that this is still true.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), July 13, 2001.

If you live in Vancouver BC, you can buy Afreey LD-2060 all region DVD/VCD/SVCD/CD/CDR/MP3 player at C$249 from Lux Electronic.

-- hi richard (hirichard@hirichard.com), July 14, 2001.