DVD plays black and white

Annabee

Ordered a special edition DVD from Amazon.com (the American site) as it is not available in UK. It is a two disk set and has turned out to be faulty and there are white marks all over one disk and it jumps and sticks. Also both disks will only play in black and white! (It is North American region, and we have a multi-regional player). Does anyone know if its because of the region thing that it's black and white, or because it's faulty anyway?

Thanks.

Darksun

More likely because the DVD is NTSC and your TV is PAL... if it was a problem with the regions, the DVD wouldn't play at all

Anyway, some TVs have both NTSC and PAL, and you can switch between them.

gcn504

Darksun is correct its symptomatic of your TV not playing NTSC. Newer tvs can switch between the two automatically.

You could prove it by playing it on your PC: you will get a warning saying its Region 1 and your pc is set to Region 2 but you allowed to switch to a different region upto 6 times (there are ways around that too). It should play in colour on your pc.

The next thing you could do, again presuming your tv can not switch between pal and ntsc, is to copy the DVD using one of the many peices dvd copying software that are available: you can change the settings from NTSC to PAL quite easily. Not entirely sure about the legality of this as a: you OWN the original disk so are entitled to make back up copies but b: as the dvd is a region 1 not sure if that impacts point a. But heh I'l doubt you'll be the first or last person to do that.

Anyway its cheaper than buying a new tv.

DuncanMiller

check your dvd setup as well

some players can do the ntsc-->pal conversion for you thus your tv would receive a pal signal and be fine

superscaper

gcn504 wrote:

The next thing you could do, again presuming your tv can not switch between pal and ntsc, is to copy the DVD using one of the many peices dvd copying software that are available: you can change the settings from NTSC to PAL quite easily. Not entirely sure about the legality of this as a: you OWN the original disk so are entitled to make back up copies but b: as the dvd is a region 1 not sure if that impacts point a. But heh I'l doubt you'll be the first or last person to do that.

You are right you are entitled to make a personal backup under the "fair use" clause but if there is any form of copy protection, circumventing it in itself would be illegal. Not sure if NTSC to PAL would be legally considered breaching region encoding but most DVDs have some form of copy protection no matter how easy it is to get around it would be illegal to.

Darksun

Under UK law there is no explicit Fair Use right to make backups (except of computer software). However, I doubt you'll get the copyright police banging your door down in this case.

superscaper

Darksun is right although you could consider ripping a cd to mp3 a form of backup and that was only recently confirmed as legal under fair use.