So a couple of days ago I got the BODYLINE DVD (see reason for my excitement in an earlier post). I stuck in into the DVD player. A helpful message appeared that told me the disk was not meant to be played in America (darn Australian disks). But I knew that would happen. I was confident I could find a hack for my Sony DVD player. After hours of searching - no luck. Then I realized. Wait a second. Even if I hacked my player, the output video would still be PAL. No good on a good ol' NTSC Sony TV. Now what do I do? Ahhh technology... There's an answer for everything.
I needed three pieces of software, and my handy dandy HP computer with DVD burner. The first software blocked my computer from recognizing that the DVD was a region 4 DVD. Then I used the second piece of software to burn the movie to my hard disk. Now this movie was still region 4, PAL signal. Now with the third software I changed the header file of the saved DVD movie to make it NTSC and region free. (This is something I didn't even know of before. It is only this header file that makes any given movie region-locked, or NTSC or PAL.) Burn these edited video files to a new DVD, and presto! I have a fully compatible DVD!
I love software.
5 comments:
is all that legal?
it is no different than, say, you downloading a song from iTunes and burning it to a cd because you don't have an iPod. since i own the original dvd, the DMCA says i am legally entitled to make a personal backup. just don't ask me for a copy... :-)
Gotcha.. all that technical jargon made me wonder. Now i can rest assured that Priya won't turn Addy into a juvenile delinquent.
Wow Bipin ... you did it. I wish i had a DVD burner.
Good for you ... i have an old Ali G movie you could change for me :) ... could the be the start of a beautiful friendship?
Hey, i could get some South african stuff too that i really want to get, and you can do the conversion.
Bipin, Bipin, He's our man, if he can't do it, nobody can!!!
hey david,
i'll be happy to convert a few dvds for you. it doesn't take that long - maybe 10 minutes/dvd. how much are dvd burners now? can you do it through your sony camcorder? i love my dvd burner - it's a 16x and works great. imagine burning 4.7GB at 2x.. :-)
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