DVD's

This is a post that will be updated over a couple of days. The first part is Wednesday, March 26, 2008.

OK, Elena wants to watch some DVD's and be able to watch TV. This post is about the DVD part of that.

I have a computer with a DVD drive, so DVD's should be easy. But I have the region code to deal with. DVDs in North America are all region 1 DVDs and will work in a region 1 DVD player or a multiregion DVD player. But the DVDs here are region 2 DVDs. They will work in a region 2 or multiregion DVD player. Apparently, the DVDs on the computer are also set to a region. In the research I've done, I've discovered that you can change the region code but only 5 times over the life of the DVD drive. I wouldn't mind changing it once in Europe and then once when back in the US. It doesn't bother me so much.

The other part I don't quite understand. There are 3 protocols over which TV signals are broadcast. NTSC which is used by the highly advanced nations, PAL which is used by the advanced nations, and SECAM which is used by the backwards nations. France used to use SECAM, but I think they recently upgraded to PAL because they didn't want to toss their lot in the SECAM crowd (Did they--it's confusing?). All over the internet, I'm reading about PAL and NTSC coding on the DVD. I suppose it could be the case that the DVD has the NTSC or PAL coding, but somehow it makes more sense that the DVD would have only the picture information and that the DVD player would ride the picture information on top of the protocol. It doesn't seem like something the DVD would have on it. And that confuses me.

Anyway, I downloaded VLC from VideoLAN which can apparently handle whatever you choose to put into your DVD drive. But I have yet to try it. Why? Read on.

One nice thing France has (which alone would make it NTSC-worthy) is a DVD rental place called Video-Futur. They have machines that are automated DVD dispensers. For a mere 1,50 euros ($2.25) you can rent a movie for 6 hours. For only 2,00 euros, ($3.00) you can rent it for 24 hours. And we have one of these about 3 blocks away. Yay!!! Today we popped in. It turns out all we need to make an account is a piece of ID and a 'justification of residence' (or whatever it's called) that we can get from the reception desk in our building (one of the nice things about a student residence). So tomorrow we'll attempt to create an account at the Video Futur, and then attempt to view one on my computer.

Stay tuned to this post for more about how this works....

Update for March 31
Last night we got a video rental card for the Video Futur just down the street. It was a machine and a store. All we needed was my passport and the Attestation of Residence. The woman explained all the rules and regulations in French. Elena understood them, but I didn't. Oh well, we get the card. They don't have a huge selection--mostly fairly recent movies. There isn't a huge section of older movies like many video stores have. They have a separate 'police' section for crime-drama, I guess. We rented Black Snake Moan for 2 euros for 1 day. You can rent a movie for 2 euros on Sundays for 24 hours.

So we came home and popped the DVD into the computer. I didn't know what would happen. Would it complain about the region code? Windows asked me what I wanted to do and "play DVD with VedioLAN VLC" was one of the options. I selected it. Then voila!!!! The DVD started and up it came. It was easy to use. The mouse worked to select the items on the menu and we were able to see the subtitle tracks and choose one (we eventually chose English because there were a couple of parts we had trouble understanding with our laptop computer speakers). But in general, I want to chose French and see the French way saying what they are saying in the movie. Someday, I'll rent a French movie and watch it with French subtitles to help attune my ear. Sadly, we are very unlikely to find French movies with English subtitles.

So the DVD worked. We are very happy.