If you're looking for the funniest stuff, I suggest starting with the Steve, Don't Eat It Homage and then the travel category. You're on your own with the older posts that have yet to be categorized.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

This Is Only A Theory...Just Like Evolution

Let's say, hypothetically, that you really liked a movie (like Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie) and that this movie is no longer sold on DVD. You may be able to, hypothetically, buy a used copy for about $100 but who would want to do that?

Now, let's say that you found out that this movie was available but only in a foreign country; how about Germany and for a reasonable price. And let's further suppose that you just happened to be traveling to that country. So you buy a copy.

Now the problem is that your hypothetical movie, that you bought and paid for and that has been released in your country will not play on your DVD player thanks to it being the wrong DVD region. However, you're a pretty smart cookie and probably knew this before you bought it. You probably figured on using DVD Decryptor and/or DVD Shrink to make a hypothetical playable copy of it. You probably knew that you can change the region on most computer DVD players 5 times. Why 5? I have no hypothesis for that.

If you were to hypothetically do all that, then you would have a copy of the movie you might be able to play on a computer but probably wouldn't be able to play on a regular DVD player. And I'll tell you the reason, pal. Sorry, that should have been: I'll tell you the reason, PAL. You see, your hypothetical movie copy would still be in PAL format which is the TV standard in Europe, while NTSC is the standard here in the US. Hypothetically, you might burn two copies of this useless movie without realizing that was the problem.

You might spend some time and do some research about PAL to NTSC conversion, or DVD players that can play PAL DVDs on NTSC TVs. But if you're lucky, you'd stumble across a nifty trick which is to basically tell your DVD player that the movie is NTSC even though it's not. It might work and it might not. It'll cost you the price of a blank DVD to find out. If it does work then you can watch and enjoy your movie. Hypothetically, of course.

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