re: #170 Last Mohican

I’m curious about this. I once tried to play a European DVD in my DVD player, and it wouldn’t work. I was able to play it in my laptop, but I had to change my region from USA to Europe in order to make it work. Then I had to change the region back to USA after I had watched the movie. I’m only allowed to do that five times before no further changes are allowed.

I have this mental image of Gordon Brown and his family gathering around the telly at 10 Downing Street, expecting to watch “The Wizard of Oz,” but then discovering that their DVD won’t work because it’s American. So then Gordon runs and gets his laptop, plunks it down on the coffee table, and spends half an hour crawling around behind the plasma TV, figuring out how to hook it up to his laptop, while his wife taps her fingers impatiently, and the kids start yawning. At last, Gordon starts up the PC, and a dialog box pops up on the plasma TV, with the message about changing the region configuration. So Gordon has to call Dell Technical Support and wait on hold for two hours so that he can ask them what to do. By that time, the kids are fast asleep, the wife is upstairs reading a magazine in bed, and Gordon is in the kitchen making her a nice cup of chamomile as a gesture of apology.

I don’t know about the US but most high end DVD players are region free here in S Africa.