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I'm looking to buy a relatively cheap US blu ray player to ship to the UK so that I can finally start watching some Criterion blu rays. I'm considering getting the Panasonic DMP-BD87 - any thoughts on whether this is a wise move?
I'm aware that I'd need a step-down converter in order to use the player in the UK, however, having never bought a US player I could really use some advice regarding what I'd require exactly. Any other UK residents who use US/multiregion blu ray players on the forum? Your advice would be greatly appreciated.

shaky wrote:Fantastic. My BDP S5100 works like a charm. I can now play 1080/50i content with the push of a button. Surprisingly, I've noticed zero problems with the HD PAL content in terms of visuals. The UK UNCLE BOONMEE looks glorious as do these region B Dreyer blus. Thanks so much, jindiana.

I've had an equally positive experience with the BDP S5100, after agonizing for years about which region-free Blu-Ray player to buy. Highly recommended.

Dumb question. So basically I just bought one of the below based on the talks here. How does one 'activate' the region free capabilities?

shaky wrote:
Just be 100% clear, you went ahead and got the Sony BDP-S5100 player from 220-electronics and it successfully converts 1080/50i content to 60hz thus making it playable on those U.S. tvs which cannot play that 50i PAL HD content? And the player disguises conversion stutters well?

knives wrote:Dumb question. So basically I just bought one of the below based on the talks here. How does one 'activate' the region free capabilities?

Did you get it through 220-electronics? If you bought a retail one, there's some software tinkering necessary that I'm not familiar with.

If you have the 220-electronics version, you take the disc out of the player, turn the player off, and hold the number button on the remote that corresponds to the region you wish to play (i.e. 1 for region A, 2 for region B, or 3 for region C). The player should automatically turn on in the proper region.

FWIW, I just got a region free Oppo-103 for my living room, and found the region changing is a bit more tedious. You remove the disc like the Sony one, but while the player is on, you have to enter "Dimmer Dimmer Dimmer Mute [Number]) on the remote to set the region. In three attempts, I managed to mess it up once, but you can't tell it didn't take until you go through the hassle of trying to start the disc and recieve the wrong region screen.

I got a retail one rather than from that site. All the same I'll try it out later. I assume for DVD there's something else to be done?

knives wrote:I got a retail one rather than from that site. All the same I'll try it out later. I assume for DVD there's something else to be done?

Well, like I said, 200-electronics actually modifies the box to make it region free, so the retail one you got probably isn't capable of it. It may even be a hardware modification for all I know.

For region free DVDs, nothing is special is required for my region free players. DVDs regions are much simpler than blu-ray- essentially, a player can be set to play multiple DVD regions, and when you put a DVD in, it just checks to make sure that DVD is on the list of regions it can play. I.E. the disc asks "Can you play region one?" and the player says "Yes I can!". A region free DVD player is essentially a player that answers "yes" all the time.

With Blu-Ray regions, it's a bit more complicated. The player can only have a single region at any one time, and the blu-ray checks to see what region it is set for, and depending on the response, it will send it to a different "screen". The correct region will send you to the title screen, while the wrong regions send you to the "incorrect region" screen. Rather than asking "Can you play this region", the Blu-ray asks "What single region can you play?" Because the player doesn't know what the "right" answer is, the user has to tell the player beforehand what region it needs to be.

jindianajonz wrote:FWIW, I just got a region free Oppo-103 for my living room, and found the region changing is a bit more tedious. You remove the disc like the Sony one, but while the player is on, you have to enter "Dimmer Dimmer Dimmer Mute [Number]) on the remote to set the region. In three attempts, I managed to mess it up once, but you can't tell it didn't take until you go through the hassle of trying to start the disc and recieve the wrong region screen.

That's much less user friendly than the procedure on my older Oppo which is:
- Remove disc.
- Switch off machine.
- Hold down Blue button until you hear a beep.
- Enter number that corresponds to desired region. You will hear beeps as confirmation, number of beeps corresponding to region the machine is now set to.
- Turn machine back on.

My Oppo had a hardware modification to make it region free. Is that the same with yours, or could you do this out of the box?

It used to be on the Oppo-93 that I had to wait for the 'no disc' message to appear before putting
in a disc, but since the 103 uses a different screen its a bit more finicky.

With the Oppo 103 the trick to avoid screwing up is to simply not rush through the sequence.
Enter the dimmer dimmer etc. code slowly, switch off the machine and wait a few seconds.
When you turn on the machine again, you should wait about ten to fifteen seconds before
inserting a disc. It's irritating, but after doing it a few times I haven't had any issues.

zedz wrote:My Oppo had a hardware modification to make it region free. Is that the same with yours, or could you do this out of the box?

Since I bought it online, I'm not sure what exactly was done to it, but I'm assuming there was some sort of hardware/software mod since the Region Free player was a seperate (and more expensive) item than the regular version of the player.

Thanks for the tip, JSC!

zedz wrote:

jindianajonz wrote:FWIW, I just got a region free Oppo-103 for my living room, and found the region changing is a bit more tedious. You remove the disc like the Sony one, but while the player is on, you have to enter "Dimmer Dimmer Dimmer Mute [Number]) on the remote to set the region. In three attempts, I managed to mess it up once, but you can't tell it didn't take until you go through the hassle of trying to start the disc and recieve the wrong region screen.

That's much less user friendly than the procedure on my older Oppo...My Oppo had a hardware modification to make it region free. Is that the same with yours, or could you do this out of the box?

What jindianajonz describes is the same thing I have to do on my hardware-modded Oppo 93 to switch Blu-ray regions. But for DVD, you only have to set it to be region-free once and then it will play everything (except for those rare discs that will only play in a non-zero region).

swo17 wrote:

zedz wrote:

jindianajonz wrote:FWIW, I just got a region free Oppo-103 for my living room, and found the region changing is a bit more tedious. You remove the disc like the Sony one, but while the player is on, you have to enter "Dimmer Dimmer Dimmer Mute [Number]) on the remote to set the region. In three attempts, I managed to mess it up once, but you can't tell it didn't take until you go through the hassle of trying to start the disc and recieve the wrong region screen.

That's much less user friendly than the procedure on my older Oppo...My Oppo had a hardware modification to make it region free. Is that the same with yours, or could you do this out of the box?

What jindianajonz describes is the same thing I have to do on my hardware-modded Oppo 93 to switch Blu-ray regions. But for DVD, you only have to set it to be region-free once and then it will play everything (except for those rare discs that will only play in a non-zero region).

I always have times where I'm playing Criterion DVDs, but then put in a blu-ray and am told it's the wrong region. I had figured the older Criterion DVDs I was playing really were region free, but had no idea once I had modded it once I was set for life on DVDs!

Thanks and doh. Now to figure out if my problem with The Good Marriage is disc or player.

knives -- it looks to me that the only way your retail version Sony will play other regions is with a hardware modification. videohelp.com lists no software hacks for your model.

It's only a minor convenience, but thank you for the help all the same. I can live off my computer.

I had been holding off buying a player because my Panasonic blu ray/vhs player was doing fine on most other regions with the "stop" "1" "0k" sequence. However lately it had been giving me problems & it seems to have more & more difficulty reading blu rays (ever since I started playing audio blu-rays), regardless of region. So I broke down & bought the Sony 5100 from 220 Electronics, they were very helpful. It hasn't arrived yet. They almost upgraded me to the 5200 (which was the same price), but doing a quick search online I noticed that the 5200 can not play SACDs, so if that's important, you might want to buy sooner rather than later, as the 5100 is discontinued & disappearing from retailers.

Help!!! (If you can).

I have a region free blu-ray player which I purchased specifically so I could play Criterion films (I live in Britain). However, while it has no problem with region 1 DVDs it just refuses to play Region 1 blu-rays. Any time I put one in it eventually puts up a message saying that the player and disc codes don't match. Since the player is region free I don't see how that message makes sense.

Can anyone advise me?

There's no such thing as a region-free Blu-ray player, only a region-switchable player. Unlike for DVDs (where you can set the player to Region 0 to play nearly all discs without further adjustment), you need to enter a code to switch your player to Region A, B, or C before it will be able to play any such discs. And then the next time you want to play something from a different region, you will need to use your region-switching code again.

Thanks swo17. That makes sense. But...how do I switch codes? (never had to do this before).

Typically when you purchase a region-free player, it comes with instructions on how to switch regions. What model of player do you have? I can only tell you how to do it on an Oppo.

swo17 wrote:There's no such thing as a region-free Blu-ray player, only a region-switchable player. Unlike for DVDs (where you can set the player to Region 0 to play nearly all discs without further adjustment), you need to enter a code to switch your player to Region A, B, or C before it will be able to play any such discs. And then the next time you want to play something from a different region, you will need to use your region-switching code again.

Some players have the ability to have the Blu-ray region-coding changed, not by entering a code, but by plugging in a flashdrive (eg the Denon 3313 & 1713, I have supplied the files to a number of people on this forum), running the software, and restarting the machine. Works like a charm.

Oh dear. It seems that I have no idea how to do this. I've had the Blu-Ray player (a Panasonic DMP-BD65) for about two years, and never tried to play a Region 1 Blu-Ray on it before now. I've dumped the manual ages ago, and have no idea what a Flashdrive is.

Thanks for trying to help....

If it has been "fixed" so it can play BD from different regions you have to switch the region manually. With my Panasonic this is done by pressing the blue button on the remote followed by a digit for the region: [1] for region A (USA and Japan) and [2] for region B (Europe and Australia). The player has to be turned off when doing this. Hope it works for you.

My Region A Panasonic DMP-BD60 can play nearly all Region B disks I've tried by simply pressing stop after the disk initially does not load. Simply wait a beat (or three), press the Menu button, and the Menu screen will load. I'm not sure if this will work for B machines and I don't think this player will load R2 DVDs.

Killeej wrote:Oh dear. It seems that I have no idea how to do this. I've had the Blu-Ray player (a Panasonic DMP-BD65) for about two years, and never tried to play a Region 1 Blu-Ray on it before now. I've dumped the manual ages ago, and have no idea what a Flashdrive is.

Thanks for trying to help....

This guide makes it seem that your particular player can be made region free for DVDs and "some blu-rays", though I have no idea what they are trying to say with this last bit. As Swo said, there is no such thing as a region-free Blu-ray player due to the fact that the discs themselves are locked (whereas with the DVD format, the player has the lock), so I'm guessing that this "some blu-rays" refers to Blu-rays that are in your region or are region-free, i.e. the stuff that could be played on any player already.

I saw the same misleading terminology used when I was shopping for region free players- the verbiage "region-free DVD and Blu-ray playback" often means "region-free DVD playback as well as (regular) Blu-Ray playback". Because Blu-Ray regions use letters while DVD regions use numbers, you can be certain you are getting the right thing if your product offers Region A, B, and C playback.

Heads up for those in the hunt in the U.S. Sears currently carries a Seiki all region (BD and DVD) machine that also does 4k up scaling (couldn't comment as to the quality of that feature). $99. I hope this can put an end to the suggestion concerning the "elitist" nature of being fully de-locked. I might add that it will also output all material in native encoding (50i or 24p, etc.), if your display can handle it. Otherwise it will convert it for you, the quality of which is a step up from my old momitsu.