DVD's - will US ones work in UK
 

I know this was a posting a few weeks back, but when I run the search I can't find it...my question is: If I buy someone a DVD in the USA and bring it to someone in England - will it work on their DVD player? Is it like VCR tapes, or are they all compatible?

I saw the post too, and I can't find it either. I think that the posters wrote that you cannot use the US and European DVD's interchangeably, just like VCR tapes.

Brianna, you can't use US DVDs on UK machines, certainly not all. We recently bought a few DVDs in NYC on the strength of the fact that our (brand new)UK DVD manual said the machine was multi-regional. Not that multi-regional, it transpired!

It's actually rather confusing. DVDs are often encoded with region "codes", such as Region 1 for N. America and Rergion 2 for Europe and Japan. (Used to allow the studios to time DVD and theatrical releases, and to cut down on bootlegging. The DVD only work if your British friends' DVD player is a "code free" machine able to play both (or all 6) region codes. In addition, the PAL (Euro) and NTSC (N. America) video standards also apply, so you need to be sure their DVD player and your DVD gift match up on both the region code and the PAL video standard, again, unless they have "codefree" machine. Confused yet?

My american DVD's did play on the DVD player in my London hotel room. We watched Sparacus with awe. Maybe the hotel had DVD players that were able to do this