Problems with region-free discs in Vietnam...

I've been making DVD's for use in Vietnam, but apparently they don't play in most (cheap China-made...) players, but they do play in more upmarket brands like Sony and Pioneer. Somehow it could be the China-made are limited in playback for censorship-reasons, but other than that I cannot find a reason. How would I go about to make absolutely sure nothing on my copy stands in the way?

I use these standard settings:



Maybe I should make a copy of my own disc using MacTheRipper or something?

Arno Peeters
www.tapetv.nl

Hey Arno,

You are not making a Region All project with those settings. DVDSP used to default as Region All like Scenarist and other apps but then it changed!!! You obviously need to enable All Regions to make it Region All, which includes Region 7.

In fact, Region 7 should always be enabled! but that is a whole different story!

I have mentioned this Regions Default setting in the Sticky at the top of this forum:
Lafcpug DVDSP Feature Requests

The cheap players might be more sensitive to Region mismatch issues possibly, assuming you're doing all the other stuff ok like burning slow, using Class A media and so on... that is if you're using recordable media of course,

Thanks: me dummy... I assumed 'Reserved' should mean for a later sw-implementation, as in 'not in use'. Will check that from now on!

Arno Peeters
www.tapetv.nl

Na it is very much Apples fault having the default like that! I bet there are a lot of people out there using recordable media and not making the project region all as it should be...

Are you sending the discs direct or are they being duplicated(/replicated) somewhere else?

If you could report back to confirm that all you changed was the regions tab setting and it made the disc playable that would be great,

Cheers,

No, we make discs of our work that we do in Vietnam to present them to all involved. We did a videoclip for instance that was authored on DVD-SP here (The Netherlands) and professionally copied over there, but have seen it failing to play on several players, most of them the 'All-in-One-Karaoke'-types with brands we never heard of. Also several (Chinese produced) notebooks and laptops failed to play it, and copying it locally seemed to be impossible. That's why I was suspecting these products of being 'safe-guarded' against Western-type media... or am I being paranoid?!
But for sure, both the originals and the copies are ok, since when a different player is used, there's no problem at all.

I will surely let you know if this made the difference.

Arno Peeters
www.tapetv.nl

If by "professionally copied" you mean replicated then there is a higher chance of the Regions Mis-match being a problem. It could be something else for sure but I've seen it being less of a problem with recordable media than replicated masters.

If you have it fail in a laptop you could drag the VIDEO_TS folder to the HDD and play it to see if it is ok and narrow things down to Pre-Master submission/Master creation.

Well the test isn't using a different player! the test is using the original in the player that doesn't play the masters... just because a disc plays in one player doesn't mean its the players fault if it fails in another.

If you really want to get to the bottom of it there are test facilities or Trai over at dvdverification.com also who does this stuff in his sleep!