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Why you might want a cheap DVD playerDec 19 '02 (Updated Jan 01 '03) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Some DVD players, especially inexpensive ones, can be easily modified to play all DVD's, while expensive players cannot.
There is an advantage to buying an inexpensive DVD player (e.g. Apex). There are well-known remote control hacks for switching off the Macrovision and region restrictions. The problem Macrovision is the name of the copy protection found on DVD players. If you try to record a Macrovision-enabled DVD to VHS, you'll watch the resulting tape and see the picture fade in and out. Region encoding is the implementation of a weird copyright law that demands that a DVD produced for sale in Europe shall not be viewable in the United States, for example. The data on the DVD's is all the same -- it's just the disk can tell the player not to play it. The solution With certain DVD players it's trivial to use the remote control to turn off macrovision and/or region encoding. For example, for the Oritron 650 you press menu-1-6-7 on the remote. With other players it requires a CD burner and a file you download from the internet. With other players (especially more expensive ones!) it requires screwdrivers and soldering. For this reason, you might be happier to own a $60 DVD player than a $250 one. You'll be able to watch that kung-fu movie your cousin brought back from Ireland. Or if your TV is old/small, it might not have the right A-V jacks. It would normally be impossible to hook up a DVD player, but with Macrovision disabled you can simply hook up the DVD player to your VCR. Or perhaps you are upgrading to a home theater system with an expensive digital projector. Macrovision can damage the projector. The catch Before you purchase a particular DVD player, search the internet for "region free" and the player's model number to make sure it's hackable. The published hacks should disable Macrovision and region encoding, and perhaps enable VCD (which may have been disabled by the factory to save licensing fees.) The differences in quality among DVD players are minor. The last time Consumer Reports reviewed DVD players, every single model got hollow red dots for excellent picture quality. Some players rated higher for ease of use. Some players got remarks for playing scratched disks well/poorly. Consider the cables you need. Cheap DVD players typically have "composite" "s-video" "stereo" and "coaxial audio" jacks but not "component" or "optical audio" jacks. DVD players (usually) come boxed with a useful composite/stereo cable. This cable is adequate (but not optimal) for plugging the DVD player into the TV. If your TV supports it, you can see huge improvement by switching from composite->s-video (and see little if any improvement from s-video->component). If your stereo-receiver supports it, you can hear huge improvement by switching from stereo->coaxial (and hear zero improvement from coaxial->optical). An s-video cable costs $15 at most stores or $5 online from computergate. Buy one 10-foot s-video cable and maybe three pairs of rca-plug cables and you'll be all set. (FYI, S-video is a big improvement over composite because of the color-TV standards implemented back in the 1950's. To more easily adopt color TV, the NTSC developed a backwards-compatible standard that crammed new color information intermingled with the existing black-and-white information. Unfortunately such intermingling is very hard to undo, so older TV sets just ignored the intermingled area of the signal. When this happens, resolution is sacrificed. It wasn't until the 1990's that products (like Sony XBR with 3D digital comb filter) were available that could separate almost all the black-and-white from the color -- the problem is that challenging. Alternatively, using S-video, the two signals never get mixed together. The color and black-and-white information essentially goes straight from the DVD to two different wires. So you don't need an expensive TV set to separate them. In this way, S-video allows an inexpensive TV set to display the full detail of the DVD.) But in the end, it really comes down to the movies you pick. Rocky V with progressive scan is still only going to be as good as Rocky V.  |
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