Mediadirect problem (Dell) or just my DVD player on my Vostro 1400

Alright perhaps this should be in a different section BUT it's more or less a mediadirect issue which i think should stay in the Dell area.

Anyways, what is the correct "format" for the area (I live in California) for DVDs? It was on USA/Canada but when I put in a legitimate (I rented it) DVD of Zodiac, it said it was incorrect. Now what does that have to do with mediadirect?

Well Windows Media player is JUST about to play it and bam media direct goes "Not so fast" and says "Wrong area".

Now I don't want to change it back and forth since you only get 5 "tries"

So any ideas? I was just testing it and it works fine on my DVD players (On the Sony one for crying out loud which is known for its "error" on DVDs that aren't from this region. So any problems?

 

Nobody knows?

 

Your DVD drive is probably set to a different region code. Chnage it to 1 if you only play DVD from the US. The other way is to use DVDShrink to remove the region protection, but that requies making a copy of the DVD that may be illegal in the US.

 

I do not know, but it has happened to me, too.
I live in Europe, region 2, and the DVD I bought on Amazon.co.uk - a region 2 DVD - was deemed by Media Direct as 'wrong region'.
That's only half of the story, since media direct died on me shortly after that. I had to take the battery out to reset the laptop (incidentally, I am now sure that my Media Direct is based on Windows XP and not on Ubuntu, as I had previously thought ).

I did not investigate further since I plan to wipe Media Direct partition and remove the program from Vista, too. But in my subsequent wandering in the OS realm, I noticed that the region of the DVD (a very noisy and loud one, I should say) is not set.

Perhaps that's the problem with DVD. I would explain why you (Region 1 dweller) and I (region 2 dweller) are experiencing the same problem about region areas.

My two cents.

 

Best not to decide the code by continent regions and use country regions instead. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code . As you can see for example Europe isn't all code 2.

 

Ah. That helps a lot. THanks

 

just so you know, if you use VLC, it doesnt bother you about region codes, or at least i dont think it does. if nothing else, just use a 3rd party app to change the region code of your dvd player, mediadirect will only let you do it a couple times.

 

Good to know, thanks.
I am about to nuke Media Direct (in all its incarnations) and to place WMP in a dark corner, stripped of every file association. I will also take great pleasure in deleting every single byte of the macrovision update service that came with Roxio's crapware.