Need Help with Video/DVD stuff

The problem you are having is the PAL (Europe and most of the the world's video formatting standard and NTSC the North American Standard. The two do not play well together. Your DVD from Europe is in PAL and the copy that plays on your PC was not converted for playing on a NTSC DVD player.

So if you are on a PC go here: http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/Convert_PAL_NTSC_DVD_page1.html

If you are on a MAC You probably need to get Roxio Toast to accomplish this.

I word of caution there will be quality loss in the conversion.

A simpler, less time consuming solution buy a DVD player that plays both PAL and NTSC. These go from the reasonable to the stupid in terms of price.

I had some problem with my Chinese DVD too. Interesting enough, XBOX can read the format of Chinese. So I played it in XBOX and recorded it back to a DVD with NTSC format.

I had this problem a few years ago when I ordered a set of DVDs from the UK, not realizing there were different DVD region codes.

It seemed easier to change the region code on my computer’s DVD player so now I watch Jonathan Creek on my computer and everything else on the DVD player connected to the teevee.

Here’s the Wikipedia Article on DVD Region Codes.

I don’t remember exactly what I did to change the region code on my computer’s DVD but I found a solution I haven’t tested myself using “change DVD region code” in my favorite search engine.

OK -- now back to figuring out how to reconnect four VCRs to cable now that Comcast has "upgraded" Burien and only one VCR can be connected to their digital set-top box.

I think that happens after four times.

That's why I leave my computer DVD player set for Region 2 and never changed the DVD player connected to my televison from Region 1.

P.S. Comcast sucks.

Dennis, as far as the embedded video is concerned you can select from a variety of providers such as YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo and others. Once your upload your video to those sites embed the code they provide and you'll get you nice little display box and arrow.

Just below the URL field on the Youtube video page is an Embed field that contains code that you can copy and paste into your blog. It's easy to miss since the Embed field only displays a single line, even though it contains a whole paragraph of code.

To add this code into a blog entry, you should select the HTML tab at the top left of the blog editor and then paste the code.

This same code can be pasted into an appropriate file of the template html, if you have access to it and are comfortable doing so.

Feel free to contact me directly if you need additional help with this.

RE: your other requests If you've already got a copy of disks that work on your laptop, the region issue has already been addressed. The remaining problem is that the file format of the copy may be compatible with your laptop DVD players (which may accept several different formats), but not with your DVD player.

For example, the copied disks may contain Quicktime or some other format which can be read on a computer, but not a DVD player. Moreover, some older DVD players are not very forgiving with all DVD disk formats (DVD+R or DVD-R).

This isn't my main line of business, but I've had to wrestle some of the issues down to the ground (including conversion of wmv files to DVD) on some projects I've worked on and could probably get something to work for you.