Travel Technology - Can someone help - Int'l DVD/Computers for dummies?

OK, here's the deal.

I have a U.S. made laptop. I travel to Europe a lot. Occasionally, I see a DVD of a European film or television program which is not available in the U.S. that I would like to watch - for example, I had to wait more than a year to get Goodbye, Lenin in the U.S. and I worried that it would never come here at all. How can I use my U.S. laptop to watch these movies and TV programs. I understand there are two barriers: One - PAL/SECAM vs. NTSC. Two - region specific programming.

Do I need a PAL/SECAM DVD drive?

Do I need special software to manage the region issue?

Thanks for your help!

PAL/SECAM is generally irrelevant to playback on the computer. I would say always but my old laptop couldn't quite cope with a Chinese DVD (it had no problems with Chinese VCD's, though)--I assume they ensured there was enough video horsepowe for an NTSC DVD but the Chinese one needed a bit more oomph.

All that matters is region coding. I would suggest looking for a program to defeat region coding. I have long used AnyDVD (http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvd.html) for it's defeating of prohibited operations (things like those copyright messages you can't skip past), it claims to defeat region coding but I've never encountered a region-coded disk that I needed to defeat so I can't vouch for that part of it.

From recommendations by this forum, www.dvdidle.com is excellent to get around region coding. :)

From recommendations by this forum, www.dvdidle.com is excellent to get around region coding. :)


This has always solved my dvd issues . . . great site! ^

OK, here's the deal.

I have a U.S. made laptop. I travel to Europe a lot. Occasionally, I see a DVD of a European film or television program which is not available in the U.S. that I would like to watch - for example, I had to wait more than a year to get Goodbye, Lenin in the U.S. and I worried that it would never come here at all. How can I use my U.S. laptop to watch these movies and TV programs. I understand there are two barriers: One - PAL/SECAM vs. NTSC. Two - region specific programming.

Do I need a PAL/SECAM DVD drive?

Do I need special software to manage the region issue?

Thanks for your help!
A DVD drive is a DVD drive is a DVD drive -- there's no such things as a PAL or NTSC drive, as it's all just data.

I routinely watch PAL DVDs on my computer. I use Intervideo's WINDVD 5, which plays PAL and NTSC DVDs with equal facility. I believe, however, that Window's Media Player (at least version 9) will work as well.

Incidently, in addition to watching on my laptop, I uses WinDVD and a video card that allows s-video output to watch PAL DVDs and DVDs stored on my computer on my home theater. I've got a sound card with an optical output and WinDVD reads DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1. We go to Blockbusters once a week, rent a bunch of DVDs, I dump to them to my PC, and we watch them at our leisure. I also copy them over to my laptop to watch on the plane (uses less battery power than watching from a DVD).

Many thanks to all for the advice. I really wasn't sure whether the PAL/NTSC thing was an issue for DVD. Glad to know that I don't need to worry about that. Thanks for the advice on the programs.

Fritter

PAL/NTSC would be relevant if the DVD was played on DVD player/TV, but most of them support both standarts nowadays anyway.

If feeling geeky, you can try flashing your DVD drive to RPC-1 firmware, which allows playback of any region DVDs without much troble. See http://forum.rpc1.org/portal.php