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Sony Multiregion BluRay Player
methodyguy
Posts: 6,044 Forum Member
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Does anyone know if Sony produce a multiregion blu ray player that is multireigon for dvds. I have a Sony Lcd tv and want to stay with Sony.
Regards
Regards
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Multiregion for Blu-Ray is more of an issue - this requires modification to the player. (When BR machines become more mainstream and are mass produced by China etc remote hacks will probably become common.) This makes them more expensive but they can be found.
For example if you checkMultiregion Magic you can find a 300 which suits your needs for £200 but it is refurbished.
Some, (maybe most?) are - it depends on the studio.
Some like Paramount, Warner and Universal release all their BRs as region free. (It's probably not a coincidence that they were originally supporters of HD-DVD which never had region coding.)
Others have a mixture - eg Disney which has about 1/3 region free or Sony which has about 3/4 region free
Finally there are some studios which have no (or vitually no,) region free titles - Fox for one.
Multiregion Magic do a Panasonic player that is only £269 that is MR for both dvd and BD
Thanks Tom but I would rather stay with Sony as they are a make that I trust.
Regards
The later models are supposed to be an improvement but this brand loyalty to Sony is something that should have died out long ago when it became clear that their gear is no better than anyone else's and often worse yet is regularly overpriced
Why pay £269 for multiregion dvd when the same price gets you multiregion Bluray too?
http://www.mrmdvd.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=22_98
Yes - it was the Sony 300 I tried - shocking pile of junk.
80% of US Bluray discs are region free however late last year region coded releases started appearing in the US that I wanted so it was time to buy multiregion
hehehe... Yeah I have the BDPS300 and it's the most attrocious consumer electronic device I've ever owned.... sure when it eventually fires up into life it performs well but you wait an eternity for it to powerup and get to the menus
I'm glad it only cost me £50 otherwise I'd have returned it as unfit for purpose
Internally it's got a Blu Ray ROM drive that's the sort from a PC, complete with yesteryear IDE connetion and I assume it has a intel 486DX with 4mb ram powering the entire operation.
I'm sure you could get more than £50 for it on Ebay.
Why not sell it and get a decent player?
Life is far too short to wait for the Sony 300 tray to open.:)
hehehe yeah... to be honest I use it about twice a month, it came as a £50 extra with my Sony TV....so thought I might as well get it.
If I really get fed up I could sell it but it's hardly worth the bother seeing as how little I use it.
Over time I've come to wonder whether it is the MR hack which causes the main Sony 'home' screen (and all the menus) to be at 60Hz.
If the player hadn't been altered would the main Sony menus have run at 50Hz?
It is certainly a pain in the butt that the (Sony) TV seems to spend an age adjusting to the frequency/resolution switch whenever I hop from another source to the S550, or drop to the menus from playing a disk.
I have the Humax Freesat+ PVR which is set to always output 1080i/50 to avoid such time wasted on the TV re-locking when I hop TV channels (even though I know the 'native' resolution being passed through is marginally better).
Effectively I've chosed to optimise for the highest quality sources. I'd like to be able to stop the S550 from jumping to 60Hz at every conceivable opportunity!... Even if that means removing the multi-region option.
One poster says the MR change doesn't make a difference.
The other poster reports that the player's menus display at 50Hz. Since my experience of my player is that it displays full-screen Sony menus at 60Hz (and when there is no disc present) it makes me a little more convinced that there is something different about mine.
I suppose the difference might be the firmware. I did update over the network quite recently (sorry I'm not quoting the version, I'm not at home ATM).
If a poster finds 50Hz (Sony)menus when a Region 1 DVD is present it suggests to me that the player has a "native" operating region (for native user-interface).
A device sold for Europe might be expected to have native 50Hz UI and for sale into the USA market 60Hz. My suspicion is that turning my European model to "multi-region" has caused it to switch to 60Hz internal behaviour.
I suppose the only way to sort this out would be to try to switch it back from MR or for someone to lookout for this behaviour before they make the change.
I suppose it is also possible that the player is negotiating with the TV on the HDMI and deciding on this frequency when it doesn't have the justification of a 50Hz disk playing.
Sometimes all this clever stuff behind the scenes seems to go too far. I'd rather configure the resolution and refresh rate manually.
I haven't yet found a way of changing this via settings. All of the force-resolution options in the S550 relate to the resolution and none that control the field-rate.
I'd like to at least try removing the multi-region feature to eliminate it. The trouble is that you can find the hack all over the place, but not how to undo it, which seems a bit unreasonable to me. If your are going to show people how to make a change you ought to say how to reverse it!
It hasn't affected out on mine, but I only connect to a 1080p tv and it outputs DVD upscaled to this.
If all I do is turn on the BDP-S550 with it connected HDMI to the Sony KDL32V4000 it will come up at 1080i/60
I think this is wrong. I live in the U.K. and the majority of my disks will be 50Hz.
I would like the player's user interface to naturally sit at 1080i/50 not 60Hz.
When I put in a region 2 DVD I would want it to upscale to 1080i/50 and because there would be no difference in the refresh rates there would not be the annoying and apparently unavoidable 10 seconds delay whilst the TV re-locks.
This isn't necessarily anything to do with multi-region playback or no-region disks. It is everything to do with what the player does in the context of not playing anything.
I wondered if it sat at 60Hz because it had been given the MR hack, but it is entirely possible that the player does this anyway (in conjunction with my TV). I can find the details of the hack all over the place but not how to reverse it to eliminate the possibility that it causes the problem.
So what I would ask is:
What refresh rate do your plasma/tft/crt TVs adjust to when you power up your BDP-S550 (or 350) without a disk in the tray? If it is 50Hz - what connector type are you using.
At the moment it seems that the only way I can get the main user-interface to stay at 50Hz is to select a 576i forced output resolution, since that implies 50Hz format.
Since I seem to be having a bit of a rant about the BDP-S550 disaster..... :-)
You put an old DVD in which has 4x3 aspect containing 16x9 in a letterbox (the old non-anamorphic, for 4x3 TVs).
The result is a postage stamp in the middle which the TV won't zoom neither will the player.
A case in point is a music DVD with many 4x3 pop-videos and some letterboxes.
With "Source format"="Fixed aspect ratio" the result is postage stamp in the middle of the screen and neither Sony device allows me to zoom or alter aspect.
With "Source format"="Original" I get the 4x3 material presented as full-height anamorphic (stretched to the edge of the screen making everything short and fat). Again there is no control of the scanning. On typing this I've guessed that perhaps I should try setting to 576i so that rescaling isn't being performed.
Nearly all my DVDs are region 2. So far I only have a few BR disks. My issue has little to do with the scaling - it is the frame rate. I accept that I have deliberately chosen to get the player to up-scale to 1080i.
I think I may have worked out why Sony's is the right solution for a BluRay player.....
I've been complaining of the annoyance of having the player run its UI at 60Hz and having to switch to 50Hz for my 50Hz DVDs. Of course when it plays a BluRay film I don't get this annoyance because most film are 24 fps and (unless the player and TV can negotiate 24) the playback will be at 60. So the 60Hz appears optimised for BluRay.
I don't have any UK TV originated BluRay material but I suppose that is home-grown/European material which might be expected to be at 50Hz.
Anyone got something like a BBC BluRay of one of the natural-history series? Do you notice the TV changing sync to 50 when playing such disks?
In the end I think I should modify my criticism to say...
"shame the player doesn't take on the frame-rate of the inserted disk if you should stop or access the 'home' menu"
I would imagine that switching off the upscaling so that the tv receives dvd's in their native sd resolution should re-enable the zoom/ratio modes
Thankfully - non anamorphic widescreen dvd's are few and far between
Agreed, I have a few but they pre-date widescreen popularity.
(Maybe few and far between but one is the original Star Wars)