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It was an early form of DRM. Meant that if you travelled to the USA or Japan say from the UK then you would not buy the latest blockbuster movie on DVD which in those days were a lot cheaper in the USA as they would not play on your UK player.

So back in the day, DVD players/burners were region specific so a PAL DVD would not play in NTSC players/drivers and vice versa. I had to learn this back in the day when I was ripping and burning dvds.

Am I missing something here. PAL and NTSC are analog broadcast formats that have nothing to do with digital DVD formats like MP3 etc. The original recordings may have been PAL or NTSC but when converted to DVDs they would be in a computer format, not an analog TV format.

Yeah me too. All my DVD Players lurking around are on the old big hdd type connection and all my mobos do not even have that connection anymore they only have sata connectors. I know you can get connection converters but I have no need.

Whats the DVD then ? Don't keep us in suspense mate. You used to be able to set your DVD player to play UK or USA discs and change it if needed. Can not remember if it was in Windows or Linux though.

robots before AI -

Stanley definitely looks like he has settled in with his new family. I love his coloring.

Well we've had Stanley about 4 weeks now and he seems to be settling in pretty well. I have heard of the 3-3-3 rule for adopting a cat: After 3 days - decompresses, starts eating, drinking and using the litterbox. After 3 weeks - really starting to settle in and show his true personality. After 3 months - owns the place. Stan being a bit older and more experienced, was OK with us after a couple of days. After a week he was eager to explore the whole house and had his favorite spots to take a nap. After a month he seems quite happy to live here and snuggle on the couch or on the bed. He still likes to find a cosy dark spot under a table or our bed for his naps. Every cat is different but we sense his gratitude at getting a home, rather than in a foster situation or a pet supply store waiting for adoption.

That was originally used by legendary comedian Spike Milligan. Actually "I told you I was ill". There's even a documentary tribute: Very likely that will be the funniest thing you see on the internets today!

I have thousands of movies but only 2 dvds, Scareface and Shawshank Redemption. I probably haven't watched a dvd in 20+ years.

Thanks! I kind of expect the DVD will play on my hardware, more likely than not. I will know in about a week when the disk shows up. Every now and then I buy a DVD movie used off of Ebay. Average price usually runs 5 to 7 dollars. Today the best prices I could find on this particular movie came from France and England. So I took a chance... US versions of this DVD release were running about twice that. Seems my movie is a 'cult classic' and so commands a better price. Clutter

I got a Panda Wireless PAU06 USB adapter. Worked amazingly well on all my Dell towers. 300Mbps. Also a lot easier than having to fuss with plug in adapters. May not be as fast, but fast enough for me, anyway. Clutter

In recent years I specialized in rehabilitating old Dell Precision desktop towers. Still have about a half dozen of them. No major failures with any of them, just occasional drives failing (once or twice in the past 10 years). I sure did enjoy this sort of 'low end' fixer upper sort of platform. Most of mine run the dual core Intel processors, but I did put a Core 2 quad in one of them. Fun! And very usable for my modest needs. I have one ancient Dell Precision 390 which I happen to be using at the moment. The rest are Precision T3400 boxes. Clutter

So basically if your drive is newer than 2003 you will be fine, otherwise it may not work.

Most dvd drives are region specific (well they were when I messed with DVDs) so a PAL would not work in NTSC drive. Ok, it's changed: https://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video/convert-pal-ntsc.htm I do not think it has anything to do with the OS itself.

Hi, All- I'm wondering if a DVD I just ordered is going to play on my hardware and software. I have perhaps made a mistake in ordering a DVD from England on Ebay which I found out is going to be in pal format rather than ntsc. I hear ntsc is the standard in the US, but a lot of the world uses pal format. I'm running Linux Mint 20 on an older Dell desktop tower, a Precision 390 at the moment (most of my boxes are Dell T3400). My DVD is an Optiarc DVD RW AD-7200A. What do you think? Is the pal format going to refuse to play on this box? Or can the player software handle it OK? BTW my native player software appears to be Celluloid. Thanks, Clutter

Eric was a good friend to the folks at Scot's Forums. He will be sorely missed. I'm sure glad that I got to know him online for some twenty plus years. It's sad to see another friend slip away. I'm grateful to have known him. Made my life better. He was a pretty amazing person... Clutter

Some setups have the option to boot in both EUFI and Legacy mode. I have a couple of laptops where that works. Alternatively you could try making a bootable USB drive with Rufus and make sure the format is GPT and the setup is EUFI.

It's true vampires live in Australia.

Thanks. I had caught on about the microcode stuff but missed the other hook stuff.

To all who contributed, thanks. I finally found a way to do what I set out to do, i.e. run the SpiinRite utility. Here's what happened: - Initial problem was I was unable to boot from the CD-ROM which had the SpinRite (Version 6.0) executable on it. - Finally managed to get BIOS to boot from the CD-ROM by re-arranging the boot order in the LEGACY BIOS (If I selected the EUFI BIOS the bootable drive which appeared was my SSD, no USB, no CD-ROM, nothing. - However, once SpinRite booted up it was not able to run (I think this is because it was Version 6.0 which came out in 2004). I went to developer web site (Gibson Research) and downloaded the latest SpinRite version, 6.1, which just was released. I loaded it onto a USB flash drive and when I ran this version it worked just fine and I accomplished what I had originally had intended to do, YEAH! (I had re-arranged the boot order on the LEGACY BIOS putting USB first) - Finally, the anomaly with my BIOS that I originally described as my problem: I was unaware that there were TWO BIOS's I could use, LEGACY and EUFI. If I used the EUFI I could only boot from the SSD, so that was no help to me. If I used the LEGACY I could select the boot source BUT when I was done with the SpinRite utility and wanted to get back to Windows I ended up in a loop because it would not let me past the drive I had booted SpinRite from, the USB drive. To escape the loop I had to return to the BIOS Setup Utility and switch back to the EUFI BIOS; it worked and I was back to Windows . . . thank God. LESSON LEARNED: I'm not familiar enough with a EUFI BIOS to know how to get it to recognized bootable drives OTHER THAN the SSD hard drive. So, in the future if I want to boot off anything other than the hard drive I guess I'm going to have to switch to the LEGACY to the work, and then switch back to the EUFI. Thanks again for your assistance, Steve