Upscaling DVD player thats region-hackable?
BTW, in general you will not see instructions in the US English manual for unlocking the region on any region-free DVD player sold in the US. I believe that selling a region-free DVD player is illegal in the USA (can’t remember which of the multitude of copyright acts this falls foul of) — or at least “discouraged” by the MPAA. You will find that most internationally-sold models are capable of being set to region-free, as this simplifies manufacturing — they only have to make one model instead of 5 or 6, then the default display options are set for the country where it is sold. For example, the same Philips DVD player is sold in the UK and can be set to output to a British PAL-standard TV as well as US NTSC standard TVs. But you will not find the instructions to set the region in the US English manual for any Philips DVD player: the manuals all say that the players will play only region 1 disks. So don’t take too much notice of what the manual says you can and can’t do. Google the mo
I bought the Philips 5992 for $49 + tax at Costco two weeks ago. Costco seem to sell these as part of their standard range (I saw online postings suggesting buying one from Costco in June and they still have them now). It is similar to the Philips 5990. It has selectable outputs, including 1080i up-conversion, is region free (see helios’response for the code that you enter to set the region on both the 5990 and the 5992). I have successfully played region 1 and region 2 DVDs on the machine with it set to region 0. The best part is that you can play movie files recorded in any standard format (MPEG4, AVI, etc.). You can burn these to DVD or you can play files from an external hard drive, via a USB2 port on the DVD player. So if you record stuff from the TV to a PVR/DVR, you can copy the files to a hard drive for later playing via the Philips. This is *so* cool!
Definitely the Philips 5982. It’s great and easy to hack with the remote. ROU_Xenophobe – the reason it’s better for the DVD player to do the scale is that with European DVDs the player can scale straight from PAL’s 768×576 up to the HD resolution. If you use a regular DVD player it’s scaling the PAL down to NTSC’s 640×480, and then the TV is scaling up, which looks like crap. Also the Philips scaler chip does a good job – lots of TVs have crappy scalers. And you can’t generally feed a PAL signal to a US HDTV to let the TV do a direct scale – they don’t accept it.
