Help with language zone settings

[hakadah]

I live in Europe and thus watch DVD's in a language other than English. However, i still like to watch DVD's in English as well. Each time that I insert a PAL version of a DVD my DVD-rom, it askes me for the language zone (territorial zone) then when I place a NTSC DVD in, the same pop-up happens. The last time I selected NTSC and when I went to watch a PAL DVD, the system gave me an error stating that the proper territorial zone code is not applicable to the inserted DVD. I went to the properties and settings and found that the DVD drivers settings stated, that it only allows a certain amount of swapping or changing of the language zone settings, thus decreasing a counter somewhere in the system and when it reaches zero no more changes can take place even if you re-install Windows XP or the driver.

My question is: 1) how would you change the value back to the begining so that different languages could be played or 2) how can you make adjustments to the system where both languages could be played whenever the appropriate DVD was inserted....thus eliminating the requirement to switch back and forth and thus decrease a counter somewhere in the system.

Any help will be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance.

Hakadah

[cfitz]

What you are dealing with is not language settings, but rather region settings that are designed solely to control distribution of movies. They have nothing to do with the language of the DVD directly.

DVD players/drives are typically restricted to just one region that can't be changed (stand-alone players) or limited to a small number of region changes (computer DVD drives).

You have apparently reached the limit for the number of user changes of the region on your drive (typically this is 4 changes after the initial setting). At this point you officially have no choice but to either stick with the region you are currently at or send the drive back to the manufacturer to be factory reset (which you also can do only 4 times).

If you tell us what drive you have we may be able to suggest work-arounds that will make your drive region-free and able to play DVDs from all regions.

cfitz

[hakadah]

The properties of the DVD only divulge that it is IDE DVD-R 16X, I have tried a couple of other hardware scans to see if it will give me the manufaturer but to no avail. I am assuming that this is one of those generic DVD players and not a popular brand, ie Panosonic, ARTEC, etc.

The driver it uses is the one supplied with Windows XP so that is of no help as well.

Thank you for your help with this......if there is a work around, I would love to hear about it!

Hakadah

[cfitz]

That ID string doesn't ring a bell for me. Maybe someone else will recognize it.

In the meantime, go here:

http://www.dvdidle.com/

and download a trial copy of "DVD Region+CSS Free". See if that does the trick for you.

cfitz