If you, like so many of the rest of us, are already hopelessly addicted to DVD, you might seriously consider reading no further. That's right. Put the paper down and just walk away.
We're about to open a Pandora's Box here, and there's a distinct possibility that you may find yourself tempted by something you'd rather not know about. Something dangerous, something forbidden — and therefore something very, very appealing.
I want to tell you about my secret stash. More specifically, I want to tell you about some of the most sparkly hidden gems in my DVD collection, the treasured special editions, the favorite movies that I thought would never ever make it to DVD. The stuff that was deemed too obscure, too extreme, too this, too that to ever appear on the 21st century's premier home entertainment format.
Here are some of the DVDs I want to tell you about: that extras-loaded, two-disc special edition of Disney's Sleeping Beauty in its original wiiiiide CinemaScope format; that beautiful box set of Louis Feuillade's legendary five-hour-plus silent serial Fantomas, complete with a lovely little book full of old French movie posters and pulp magazine covers; that nice-looking edition of Orson Welles' rarely seen Chimes at Midnight; those extras-packed DVDs of Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy: Red, White and Blue; that gorgeous anamorphic edition of Dellamore Dellamorte (a.k.a. Cemetary Man); that widescreen disc of Fellini's La Dolce Vita; those neat little DVDs of classic B-pictures like Out of the Past, Johnny Guitar and I Walked with a Zombie; those cool double-feature discs of Luis Bunuel's El teamed with The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De la Cruz, and Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher backed with Le Femme Infidele (the original and superior version of Faithless); that special edition of the Vincent Price shocker Witchfinder General (a.k.a. The Conqueror Worm); the box sets of those fabulously subversive animated TV series' Futurama and The Family Guy; that two-disc edition of Visconti's immortal The Leopard; that treasured DVD of the Powell-Pressburger David Niven classic A Matter of Life and Death, better known in this country as Stairway to Heaven.
What's that you say? You didn't think any of those movies were available on DVD? Well, you're right. Sort of.
Technically, none of these movies are available on DVD — at least not in this country. But all of them exist. All of the titles I've mentioned are produced and sold exclusively in other countries, and they're all specially encoded so that, theoretically, they can't be seen outside the particular area where the DVD originates. For the purposes of DVD coding, the world has been divided into six regions, with each region unable to watch coded discs from any other. We're No. 1 (natch), Western Europe is No. 2, the Hong Kong area is No. 3, Australia and South America are No. 4, and so on. The reasoning behind the code system has to do with lots of things, but it all comes down to the fact that motion picture studios don't want to lose massive revenues by having a movie easily accessible on DVD in any country before it's even opened there in the theaters.
What this means is that DVD players manufactured and sold in North America are only compatible with Region One discs and will not, for instance, be able to play a Region Two disc from England or France. As if this weren't complicated enough, there's also the little hitch that, here in the U.S., our televisions and all the hardware and software we pump into them use the NTSC system, while in most of Europe they're on something called PAL (no, it's not a drug; PAL and NTSC refer to the frequency and number of scan lines in a TV image). I don't profess to be any sort of expert on the technical differences between NTSC and PAL, but suffice it to say that we're talking oil and water here. The bottom line: The powers that be have done their best to make it extremely difficult for one part of the world to view DVD goodies from another part of the world.
There are, of course, loopholes to this rule, and that's where the story gets interesting.
There are currently a number of DVD players out there that are capable of cracking these regional codes, and a handful that will, with varying degrees of success, even manage the dreaded PAL-NTSC conversion. Most of these players are prohibitively expensive high-end machines, but some of them — the ones we're concerned with here — are quite reasonably priced and readily available, if you just know what you're looking for.
Here's a brief run-down of what's available: for roughly a hundred bucks, you can run down to Wal-Mart or Sam's Club right now and pick up a Daewoo 5800, which, by selecting "All Region" on the remote, becomes capable of playing DVDs from all over the world. The Daewoo will also convert PAL to NTSC, but not perfectly: It reportedly stretches anamorphic images a bit and squeezes non-anamorphic pictures. Other than that, the only real caveat is that this is a low-end player (as you can tell from the price), with all the attendant problems of low-end machines.
Other cheapo players you might want to investigate include various models put out by Sampo and Apex (the Apex 600A is the best known of the bunch). These players often require some sort of modification in order to get them to play other regions (generally just a quick hacking of the remote), so make sure you know what you're getting into (www.nerd-out.com is an indispensable resource). Pre-hacked and modified Sampos and Apex's are often available on eBay in the $200 to $300 range.
Somewhat higher end players that will do the job (with just a touch of modification) include Toshiba's multi-code SD 1700 and four models by JVC — the XV-S500, XV-SA70, XV-S608K and XV-F80. The best place to pick one up is online, and a good place to start looking is www.laserexchange.com. Their information line is 1-978-774-2085.
I've saved the best for last. The king of all-region players is the Malata and, frankly, this is probably the best place to begin and end your search. In addition to near-perfect PAL-NTSC conversion, the Malata is a great little machine, with a beautiful, progressive-scan picture and lots of cool extra features. I have last year's model, the N996, but the new Malata DVP-520 sounds every bit as good. It's available from the Canadian site www.nbtelectronics.com for about $280 shipped (don't be confused by the prices quoted on the site — they're in Canadian dollars). Other sites carrying the Malata include www.plasmadeals.com, www.220-electronics.com and www.goldenshop.com. They also show up from time to time on eBay, although you'll probably wind up actually paying more by bidding on an auction.
Researching a prospective player is crucial, and there are lots of Web sites out there designed to help you do just that. Nerd-out.com is probably the best of the lot, but www.AVSforum.com is also helpful and www.dvdcompare.org.uk is quite good too. For what it's worth, I began my region-free life by picking up an $89 Oritron at Best Buy, only to discover it would play my NTSC Region 3 discs fine, but mangled PAL DVDs, turning color movies into black and white (!). My second player, a pre-hacked Apex I bought for a couple hundred bucks on eBay, played everything fine, but the image quality was a bit soft for my taste. After unloading the Apex (back on eBay), I moved on up to the Malata, which is where I am today, happy as a code-free clam.
The joys of the region-free life are a movie buff's dream come true. It's all there for the taking, the fruits of more than a century of cinematic grooviness, at user-friendly e-stores in England, France, Spain, Germany, Asia and elsewhere (a healthy sampling of e-stores can be found in the international forum at www.dvdtalk.com). From Paris Texas to Neil Jordan's In the Company of Wolves, from David Cronenberg's The Brood (under its French title, Cromosome 3) to the classic British thriller Dead of Night (under its French title, Coeur de la Nuit), and from the collected works of Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pier Paolo Pasolini to the gypsy musical Latcho Drom to the Brit cult sci-fi Day of the Triffids — it's all out there.
The world is waiting. Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2002.