Though be warned, these will be PAL and unless you have one of a handful of models, won't play on an NTSC DVD player. You should be able to play 'em on a computer DVD drive.

Edited by - Gabriel Nine on Sep 7 2001

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(Without English subtitles BTW, but I can pretty well figure out about half or a third of it, which is enough -- without knowing either Italian or Spanish. (But some French.) The DVD titles are in English, but once the movie gets going its all Italian. Charmingly so. Especially out of Sandy's mouth. What a cute little Italian blonde -- who gets Rocco, as her movie star idol, to facilitate (and participate, but mostly in the background on this one) in her outrageous fantasies. It's got a different feel from any other Rocco vid I've seen, but its definitely worthwhile.

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That's because these tend to be offbrand Taiwan/Hong Kong/Chinese brands, not only made there (as most sets are), but also with a brand and firmware from there. They have a penchant for getting around US copy protection and related schemes in those markets -- it's what their domestic markets demand. So some units find there way into the US channel.

I've got the rather famous (in techno circles - which isn't what I do but one of several hobbies up to a point) Apex 600A, which not only can play any region DVD and convert from PAL (Euro) to NTSC (Americas, Oceana) video standards, it can also completely and seemlessly defeat tape copy protection. I.e. I can make far better than pre-recorded tapes of rental DVD's (or scenes) from my Apex. That last feature was discontinued under Hollywood pressure on their main U.S. distributors, such as Circuit City.

Wouldn't be surprised if current Apex models will have all the region defeating features though. If not, something else out of the China orbit will. Search the web. Throwing the name Apex in the search will probably help you find successors, if Apex has gotten too big now to fly under the radar on Region defeating.

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I know the issues are pretty severe in going from NTSC to PAL, which is BY FAR the largest market demand for conversion.

(Because DVD's are as much as half as expensive from US net channels as they are in Europe, and most American titles, the mainstream non-Indie ones anyway, which is the vast bult of the world movie sales unfortunately, comes out as much as 6 months sooner or even more on Region 1/NTSC.)

(Whereas the main reasons for getting discs from Europe is to get around one form or another of censorship at the margins. (Self censorship to get the R rating in mainstream, and threat of litigation at the margins in hardcore. Well, there are also some French and Spanish art/mainstream films I'd like to get which are not certain to come over here on DVD and anyway take much longer. But this is a much smaller market pull.)

Anyway, when going from NTSC to PAL, you lose color as well as get some height vs. width distortions, when your player can read the region 1, but doesn't convert. When going from PAL to NTSC, there is no color issue even without conversion. I'm pretty sure of that from the IMDb message boards. What I've heard you sometimes get is a SLIGHT expansion of the vertical with some players -- since PAL sets are somewhat more square (even) than regular US sets. Though others say they never notice anything at all on players which don't have any explict option to enable PAL>NTSC conversion (as e.g. the Apex 600A does). And I haven't heard anyone actually complaining as opposed to speculating about it. But the number of people you can fairly readily find talking about this is very small so its hard to tell.

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