POWERPUFF71

Can US cd's and dvd's be played on European players? and vice versa? I know I have had problems with foreign vcr tapes in the past not playing on
US players. Help. Thanks

violagirl

CDs shouldn't be a problem. DVDs are region-encoded. Europe & the US are in different regions - so unless you have a multi region player they won't work

BrimhamRocks

CD's are no problem.

Videos, DVD's, and video games like Playstation, etc. are encoded by region, as violagirl said.

ira

Hi,

I have many CD's bought in Europe. They all work on a US player.

drsawyers

In general, North American DVDs will NOT work in Europe (and vice versa). There are two issues: disc format and output format.

The movie industry has decided that they can maximize their profits by formating DVDs and players to be mutually exclusive in various regions of the world. So, with a few exceptions, DVDs purchased in NA will only play on DVD players purchased in NA.

In addition, European tv's use the PAL format for video input, while NA tv's use NTSC. This is the same problem as with VCRs. The formattting issue is a new twist thrown in for DVDs.

There are a couple of ways around this, neither of which is very appealing. One is to buy a multi-region DVD player with the proper video output (PAL or NTSC). These are expensive and don't necessarily always work. Plus, I'm not sure if the legal issues have been tested in court.

The other option is to watch DVD's on a computer with the region encoding set to either NA or Europe (there are no video output problems with a computer). The problem with this is that most computer systems only allow the DVD region setting to be changed a limited number of times (~5). So you can set your American computer to watch European DVDs, but you can't switch back and forth at will.

I have some German-language Asterix movies I purchased from Amazon.de; I have my computer permanently set to play European DVDs. (American DVDs I watch on a DVD-player.)

Queenie

If you have access to a code free DVD player you can play code 1 & 2 DVDs - american and european.

It costs about $25 more for a code free DVD player - they can change the setting in the store, or some friends of mine have been able to change the setting themselves at home.

We play Sex in the City DVD's from america(code 1), and rent the Euro videos (Code 2) all the time.

AR

Region Zero (0) DVD's will play anywhere. But, there is precious little out there in this format.

uhoh_busted

I brought a bunch of CDs I'd copied on my PC for our rental car in France. They played just fine. (I was also glad I only brought the copies, because even though we thought we'd been careful to clean out the rental car...we left them! Hope someone else enjoyed them even if it was just a Hertz employee.