standard dvd playback

[thebarefootkid]

Anyone considdering upgrading to bd (or more accurately WHEN to upgrade) like me must be worried about the playback of their standard def dvds. I have a collection of many hundreds of dvds and a large percentage are rare and special edition dvd from around the world.

i am from europe and so obviously had to hack my regular def dvd player to allow playback. now i know that blu ray is region coded and that the regions are slightly different BUT...

...if i have a foreign standard-def dvd will it play on a european blu-ray or will it only play on a bd player from that region? will i need to hack it and how complicated will that be if possible at all on these early gen players. This is of massive importance to me as some of my region 3 imports are very precious to me and i dont wanna upgrade yet if i need to keep my standard dvd player connected too.

[bootman]

Keep your current SD player for those disks.
Not every DVD will be re-released on a HD format.
I seriously doubt that any bluray player will be able to be hacked in that way.
Region coding (and other security measures) are a big part of the Blu movement.

[thebarefootkid]

but will there be region locks for sd discs on blu-ray players - surely someone knows definately?

[Frode]

Originally Posted by thebarefootkid

but will there be region locks for sd discs on blu-ray players - surely someone knows definately?

Yes, they have region locks for SD DVD. Some, like the Samsungs, have remote hacks for that though.

[thebarefootkid]

cheers mate

i think im gunna pick up the new sharp becuase i get a massive discount for sharp online - hopefully a hack will become available for my sd discs and hopefully the regions for the bd discs wont be too stringent - they are a con anyway

[jdc115]

Originally Posted by thebarefootkid

Anyone considdering upgrading to bd (or more accurately WHEN to upgrade) like me must be worried about the playback of their standard def dvds. I have a collection of many hundreds of dvds and a large percentage are rare and special edition dvd from around the world.

i am from europe and so obviously had to hack my regular def dvd player to allow playback. now i know that blu ray is region coded and that the regions are slightly different BUT...

...if i have a foreign standard-def dvd will it play on a european blu-ray or will it only play on a bd player from that region? will i need to hack it and how complicated will that be if possible at all on these early gen players. This is of massive importance to me as some of my region 3 imports are very precious to me and i dont wanna upgrade yet if i need to keep my standard dvd player connected too.

I don't think the Blu-ray region will be hacked to be region free so soon but you have the same issue as me. Either the DVD portion is region free or you keep 2 players and at the moment I think the answer is two players. I live in a place where almost every DVD player is region free (high end or low end manufactures) but the Blu-ray players are not for DVD. I went to a store that sold modified PS3's the other week that they stated played multi-region games and DVD's but it did not work on the DVD's and it probably would get disabled on the next firmware update.

So keep a different region Free dvd player to be safe