A note on DVD and blu-ray regions.

You might have noticed that on the back of your DVD cases they say 'Region 2' if you live in the UK. For Blu-rays they might say Region B for UK.  Due to licensing and publishing complexities around the world we still have to suffer the fact that many films are locked to a certain 'region' thus rendering them incompatible with a dvd or blu-ray player from another country.  This is surely no big deal, because you can get everything you want in the UK right?  NEIN!

So you want to watch Dark City (1990's cult sci fi noir) on blu-ray?  Well the UK region B is out of print and will set you back too many coins.  But its still available for under $10 in the US on a region A locked blu- ray.  Or you want that elusive Marx Brothers collection that sells for up to £100 in the UK, but the USA boxset can be picked up for $18 on Amazon.com.  Or what about those masterful Criterion collection dvds and blu-rays that are region locked for North America.  This is a real pain in the  rumpus.

Solutions?

For DVD's you can go and buy a multi-region dvd player for £30-40 off amazon.  Before you do that, google search region hacks for your current dvd player. Many existing dvd players have simple combination codes that can be punched on the remote, unlocking the region lock on the dvd player.  Its straight forward and involves no tampering with the hardware.  A world of American dvds is now available to you!

Blu-Ray is another beast.  If you want a multi-region blu-ray player your looking at £180-200.  Ouch. Unlike DVD players, most blu-ray players don't have region free hacks.  I bought a philips blu-ray player for about £60 and found this to be the case. I could unlock it for DVD but not for blu-ray.  This is really annoying as there are a number of region A blu-rays that for absurd reasons we haven't got in the UK.  As well as the aforementioned criterion discs, take for example Woody Allen's midnight in Paris - a recent film with gorgeous cinematography. DVD only release in the UK.  This is absurd.  What can one do?  Well - here's what I did - I got a cheap (under £40) blu-ray player made by technika from my brother in law.  He bought it in tescos a couple of years ago.  This Technika BRSS10 isn't made anymore - they were quickly stopped (I wonder why) but you can find them on ebay pretty cheap.  Why advocate a crappy and cheap blu-ray player?  Well it turns out that this model has a blu-ray region hack!  Not only can you unlock the dvd, you can punch in a code and change the blu-ray region as often as you like.  This must have been a shoddy factory procedure without sufficient steps taken to protect the player from hacks, but it shows that sometimes it can be done with cheap units.  I now have a nice selection of Region A blurays that play fine on my player (midnight in paris looks amazing).  The downside is that this player has started to play up a little bit recently, however, if it packed up I would try and track another one down as its so much cheaper than a big brand multi region player.  Here's the hack:

Switch on open tray press "set-up" on remote enter 9113 An additional configure menu will come up on the left hand side of the screen that allows you to change the dvd region to any or region free. Below that it lets you set the Bluray region to A, B or C.

L.