Going over to the States next week and am thinking of taking the Home Land series to watch on DVD (I get fed up of their incessant advert breaks on normal TV….).
Anyway, the question is, does anyone know if you can play DVDs bought here in the UK in American DVD players. They are not blu ray.
Is there anything I should look for on the packaging (there’s nothing I can see that mentions it’s compatibility abroad….).

Thanks,
J

Think the DVD player needs to be multiregion

UK = Region 2, US = Region 1.
You’ll be able to play them on a multi-region player.
(Or rip them with DVD Shrink and reburn multi-region before you go.

Depends on the DVD player – all but Sony can be made multi-region by entering a hack code via the handset.

(Only done it in the UK with DVDs from US/Canada. Thanks Uncle Garth!)

Multi region. Right, thanks all.

Will check when I get there.

Your chances of it working are somewhere between slim and none.

The vast majority of discs sold in the UK are region 2 and will say [2] somewhere on the disc / packaging. Some are region 0 (ie, will play on any player) but these tend to be things other than movies / TV shows. Music videos, kids’ shows, documentaries, that sort of thing.

Multi-region DVD players are relatively common in the UK, due to the ubiquity of American movies. The same is not true in the US, you will be hard pressed to find a player that isn’t region 1 locked.

You could rip them, but then you’ve got the small issue of taking pirated DVDs through customs. If I were you, I’d probably take a laptop with me that had a DVD player in it.

Oh yeah, and,

Region coding aside, the discs will be in PAL format rather than the American NTSC. Modern PAL-standard TVs will generally accept an NTSC signal, but the reverse is not true. So, even if you were to find a multi-region player, it would also have to be able to cope with a PAL source, and you’d need to find a PAL-compatible TV.

DVD. SO last century…

Oh hush.

Take a laptop and HDMI lead?