How to go REGION FREE with BLU-RAYS - Multi-Region Blu-ray Player Guide - Physical Media 2021

so you found out that one of your favorite movies is not available on blu-ray in your country but it is somewhere else in the world well usually you'd be out of luck but you can go region free with your blu-ray purchases now if that sounds confusing in this video i'm going to explain what region locking is how to get around it and lastly i'll look at some multi-region blu-ray players so do stick around for all of that hello my name's elliot and this channel is all about collecting blu-rays i hope everyone is doing very well i'm currently here in england it's locked down it's winter hence the beard but i'm continuing to watch great movies and i couldn't do that without a region free blu-ray player so i'm going to tackle a number of things in this video and i will leave timestamps down below in the description so if you don't want to know about what region locking is you can just skip straight to the bit about getting multi-region blu-ray players let's get into it shall we so what is region locking well you may have noticed on the back of the blu-rays that you've purchased in the past that there is a little symbol on the back of the case blu-ray discs are typically region locked based on the country that they are produced in so for example a disc made in north america will be a region a disc whereas a disc made in the uk will be a region b disc there are examples where there are discs that are a b and c so you don't have to worry about region locking but those are not as common as disks that are region locked but what does it mean what does it mean for a disk to be region a rather than region b well for that we need to look at the hardware itself so i'm talking about the blu-ray players that we have in our homes there is a certain firmware on a blu-ray player that locks that player to playing discs only from that region that the player was manufactured for so why is it that you can't buy a region a criterion collection disk for example and play it straight out of the case on a uk region b player well this has a history going back to the early days of dvd when there were also region codes on dvds as well but it was numbers rather than letters and it's mainly to protect the right holders of the content that is on a disk and also to promote competition within different regions of the world so to break it down for you i'm going to use an example of a film in my collection and i've just picked a random disc off the shelf here it's called barry lyndon and this is the criterion collection release from north america so this is a region a locked disk and it will only play on a player that can play region a discs now the rights holders to barry linden the movie have many different licenses for the movie around the world so you will find that there are blu-ray discs available in europe for example which are not the criterion collection disk it's another distributor who has made up a barry lyndon blu-ray and is selling it on the market this is good for both the rights holders and the people in the local industry because say for example there was just one edition of barry linden in the entire world and it was this criterion collection disc but it was produced in every country in the world people would have the choice because of how globalized the economy is people could buy the disc from the cheapest location in the world so you may see for example blu-rays that are sold in india could be much cheaper than blu-rays that are sold in north america or in the uk and that would instantly make people want to import them from india at really cheap prices and ignore the local economy and the local companies releasing the disk so when a film can be released by different distributors all around the world in different countries with these region codes locked to the disks this is great for the right holders it's great for the companies releasing the disks and it's it's only really not that great for the consumer because it limits our choice but for the industry it's great so number one way to get around this and this might be the cheapest option is simply to buy a second blu-ray player from the other region say for example you're in the us and you want to play region b discs well all you would need to do is buy a player manufactured for england for example and just import it to your home and have two players in your home setup do you have a look into it yourself because i do know there will be some differences like the power connections will be different of course and there may be some electrical differences i don't know so do have a look into that yourself but i think that's potentially the cheapest option another cheap option is if you have a computer with an optical disk drive that can play blu-ray discs then you can play discs from any region on a computer sometimes you need certain software but that is one way to get around it particularly i know that some people like to rip the content from the blu-ray discs uncompressed onto their computer that's a way to get around region coding because at that point you're not playing the disk you're playing the digital file that you just ripped so that is another option if you have a blu-ray drive in your computer but the main option and probably the thing that everyone is here for is to just get a multi-region player a player that can do everything in one box and it sounds magical but why is it so difficult to work out what to buy where to get it from and is it even legit so here's something that's not particularly obvious the companies that make blu-ray players around the world so big ones such as sony lg panasonic etc these companies do not make a multi-region player out of the box this is because of those region code restrictions from rights holders that i mentioned before these companies have contracts in place that say that they will not produce a player that can play disks from other regions so that is locked into their contracts somehow i'm not an expert i'm not an insider from these companies what this means is that any multi-region player that you come across has been modified so it has been modified by a third party and then this third party business sells those players on the secondary market the multi-region player that i have is an oppo udp203 that player was modified and the store that i bought it from they sold it as modified for an extra cost what you will find with all of these multi-region players that have been modified is that to play a disc from another region you first have to input a code into your remote control to actually activate the player as that region so it's a bit of an inconvenience but i don't actually know any players that get around this there's always some kind of code or button that you have to press on the remote to actually switch to the other region so for the next part of this video i'm going to hop over to my computer i'm going to take you with me i'll show you my screen and we'll have a look on amazon at some of the options for region free players and we'll have a look at the us amazon and the uk amazon just to cover as much ground as possible hopefully after this you'll get a good idea on what to look out for in buying your own multi-region player but i will include links to the players that i'm going to look at now in the description below and of course if you click these links and purchase one of these players it does help support the channel at no additional cost to you so i'd be thankful if you use those links if you are looking to buy a multi-region player anyway let's get over to the computer and let's have a look at some players so we're here at my desk and on my computer i'm going to show you some of the blu-ray players that are multi-region that you can buy right now on amazon now i should say as a disclaimer that i don't own any of these blu-ray players but these are perhaps some of the ones that i would be looking at if i was in the market to get a multi-region player right now anyway let's just get on looking at amazon so i'm on the home page of amazon now and i'm just going to type multi-region blu-ray player and we'll see what comes up so if we go on this one this is a sony player bdp s3 700. down here they are saying that it plays blu-ray region a region b and region c now something that's important to note that i've seen people get caught out on before is they buy a blu-ray player that is said to be region free but when they buy it they realize it isn't region three and the only thing that was region free was playing dvds on the blu-ray player so that's something to be careful of because you don't want to buy a blu-ray player and find out it can only play region 3 dvds because you want it for playing blu-rays something that is worth noting as well is that when these third-party companies have gone in and messed with the hardware and the firmware that voids any manufacturer's warranty so say for example you buy a multi-region blu-ray player from amazon here and you realize that it doesn't work or say for example in a year's time it just breaks and the player just doesn't work you can't take that back to sony and sony will not replace it because the fact that the blu-ray player has been opened and tinkered with that voids their warranty i do know that some of these third-party sellers so for example this is from a company called dynastar they do tend to offer their own warranty so if you have a problem with the player that they have modified they will often replace the player for you so yeah so we can see from this one one of the things to be careful of is look at the different options here because they may not all be region free some of them may be misleading so what i'll do is i'll have a look at another one on amazon.com and then we'll hop over to amazon.com.uk to see what's on there so we've had a look at that sony player and i will link to that down in the description if it looks like one that you want to have a look at you can click the link and take a look for yourself now i found this other one this is an lg player you can see that this lg bp175 is currently 149 on the us amazon but if you have a look for that player elsewhere on amazon the same model lg bp175 is 80 now this is obviously the unmodified player so you're paying an extra 60 dollars to have it modified or seventy dollars even to have it modified to play all regions so do be careful that if you for example were looking at the lg bp175 multi-region and you thought oh i'll get one cheaper well no because this is the unmodified standard blu-ray player so do be careful so anyway on this amazon listing for the multi-region lg player it says 100 region free guaranteed and it's got the abc so by all means this is a multi-region player that you could go for so looking at the description you want to make sure that it says region free and that it explicitly says blu-ray region a region b and regency are not just dvds from any of the eight regions someone here saying it works great they decided to get a region free blu-ray player so that you could get a much cheaper region b disc of a show and that's what i was talking about earlier the difference in price in different regions that's the whole reason they're locked is to avoid this kind of thing but you know if we can get around it we'll get around it and for my uk friends let's have a look on amazon.com uk so again i'm just going to search multi-region blu-ray player and we'll see what pops up and i think it's going to be fairly similar stuff so this lg model for example this is i don't think this is the same model as the us one we just looked at but it looks exactly the same it's that same brand dynastar so it's the same brand operating in different countries and again i imagine if i just have a look for this lgbp 250 here in the uk we will find one much cheaper but it won't be the multi-region so here you go here is the lg bp 250 and it's only 55 pounds compared to 134 now what i'm i'm not suggesting you go and buy the 55 pounds one i'm saying that will not be multi-region because what this company dynastar have done they have bought a load of these cheap players for 55 pounds or perhaps cheaper from their supplier they have modified them and they're now selling them for a higher price on amazon so again like the us players you can see here it says plays blu-ray region a b plus c this would probably be the player that i would go for now but we'll just go and have a look at some more players so if you didn't want to get that lg player here is a sony bdp s1700 i think this was the same one we looked at in the us and again you can clearly see from this image that they're advertising region a b and c they are offering a three-year warranty so again it says here regions a b and c those were the two players that i would go for if you're in the uk you're going to be looking at around this price point of 140 pounds so just have a look see which kind of one you would go for and if you want to buy one of these and support the channel i'll include those links down below there you have it that's about everything i can think of to do with multi-region players and going region free so i do hope it's been helpful i hope that it's been able to clear up some of the confusion about what region codes are why they exist you know what the purpose of them is and also i've shown you some players there so if you're in the market for a player do go and check those out through the links below and if you like the look of them um purchase them and you'll be able to watch blu-rays from anywhere in the world if you want to stick around on the channel just click one of the videos that's on screen now because you can get more recommendations for blu-rays and 4k blu-rays etc i'll be back very soon with more videos on blu-ray collecting so until then stay well and keep watching great films

Channel: Boutique Blu-rays with Elliot Coen

Views: 167,465

Keywords: region free, region a, region b, region free player, multi region blu ray player, region free criterion, region free arrow video, 4k region free, region locked blu ray, going region free, region free blu ray player, region free blu ray, region free blu ray disc, unlock blu ray player, unlock blu ray region codes, physical media vs digital media, physical media vs streaming, physical media guy, blu ray collection, blu ray collection 2021, blu ray collecting, home theater

Id: ozDtyszbzB8

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021