[Jane Sherwood]

Ok, this may or may not be a stupid question, but I honestly have no idea since it's not the kind of thing I would usually think to try.

Can you burn a copy of a ripped Region 2 PAL DVD onto a Region 1 NTSC DVD, then play it successfully on a Region 1 DVD player? Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but there is no Region 1 version for what I'm trying to get.

Would something like that work, or am I just a step away from wasting some perfectly good blank DVDs?

[Chefelf]

It really depends on your burner. Try using DVDShrink which will ask you the region of the DVD and then may offer you the option to change you're burner's region. Warning: some burners have a limited number of times you can change the region (usually 10 times).

I did this with the show Spaced and it worked perfectly.

After it's burned it's now region free.

[Spann]

The DVDs themselves are region free - they are essentially a blank canvas for data to be stored on, whether it be region 1, 2 or any other. However, your drive may refuse to recognise the DVD as it is the wrong region, unless you do what Chefelf said above.

On a different note, Spaced is AMAZING. It's my favourite SitCom of all time.

[civilian_number_two]

Unless I'm mistaken, it's not the region encoding you need to worry about, but the PAL vs NTSC. I think you need to comress the video to a DivX or something before you can store it in the other format, and you may lose something in the translation. Please let me know whether I'm wrong about this, because I'm genuinely curious.

[Spann]

That sounds about right to me.

The Aspect Ratio and refresh rate will differ, so converting it into a high quality divX, avi or mpg, and then burning as normal should work.

That is, if your DVD drive decides to read the disc in the first place.

Also, why not just region unlock your DVD player?

[Chefelf]

Well, region coding is a little different. If you decrypt a PAL DVD you can then burn it to NTSC with no additional converting. The DVD player will read the disc just fine.

With VHS you can't achieve this without some sort of conversion hardware to convert the signal.

Most electronics units (video game consoles, DVD players, etc.) have the ability to do any region but are locked down so that they stay within their region and only play media from that region. Simply unlocking the players and/or media will give you the ability to play anything just fine.

[Jane Sherwood]

How do you unlock a DVD player, then? I got DVDShrink, but I'm holding off on trying anything until I finish getting the DVDs.