My wife is Russian, and she's come to this country with her collection of zone 5 DVDs, which we'd like to be able to watch on any DVD player in our house.
I've gone the route of buying zone free DVD players. Actually, three times now, none of them lasted much more than a year, so I'm done wasting my money doing this.
I've tried other DVD Copy software which seem to imply that they will make region free copies, but they don't work; it seems they can get around the region code to make the backup, but that the backup itself is still region coded.
Anyhow, using DVD Shrink, I start a backup to a DVD+WR (not going to waste any DVD+R until I figure this out), a dialog window pops up, and in the DVD Region tab, it says "Select the region in which you want your backup to play, or select 'Region Free' to make a disc which will play all regions."
Okay, my English is pretty good, and this seems to say that when it's done, I can put the backup into my home DVD player and watch it. But I keep getting a message to the effect that the disc is region coded and can't play it.
Is there something I'm missing here? Anyone have any experience trying to do this? I've have used this in conjuction with software that enables my PC to read any region coded DVDs, but this makes no difference.
It's likely that the PC burner is region coded to region 1 (if your in North America).
You can change the burners region to accept the disk - but it's usually only five times you can do it, then the burner is locked to the last region selected.
Once the files are ripped to the hard drive, no region coding applies to them, nor to any disk burned from them.
To prevent your burner from having it's region changed, I think you can run 'Any DVD' in the background then insert the disk to be ripped.
DVD Shrink can then be used to rip the files.
Note that the resultant files will probably be in 'PAL' video format (North American DVD players generally want NTSC) and you either play them in a DVD player that allows PAL and NTSC or convert them to NTSC (and lose the DVD menu).
