A question for members in Germany

April 4th of this year is a friend's big 1-8 birthday! She's in Germany. We got to be friends when she was the foreign exchange student my senior year in high school. Anyways, the point if this is: I want to send her a DVD of her faovrite movie for her birthday. Are the DVDs I buy here in the US going to work in Germany? I know of other foreign exchange students who couldn't buy DVDs here & watch them when they got home. Something about not working in their DVD players. I don't want to send her a DVD only to find out she can't even watch it. That would be mean.

The USA is Region 1 encoded and Europe is Region 2.

It is very likely that Region 1 will not play on a Region 2 dvd player unless that player is multi-regional.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...459921-3626046

Have a look at this it explains it better than i could

I suppose you could buy region 2 DVDs online even in USA?

Originally Posted by Ryn

I suppose you could buy region 2 DVDs online even in USA?

Click to expand...

Some devices will play DVDs from all regions, provided that they're hooked up to a TV with NTSC (US norm) backup. Generally speaking though, they won't. You could ask your friend what kind of set-up she has.

Do you have an amazon.com account? If so, you can use your password to log in at www.amazon.co.uk or at www.amazon.de and order the DVD there and have it shipped to your friend directly, but billed to your account (I do it all the time).

My sister married a german man and lived in Wiesbaden for years. We sent her US dvds all the time and she had no problems playing them.

It depends on the dvd player, but most of the newer dvd players have the coding chip removed which lets them play any region. Found that out when I recently had to buy a new dvd player and my bf was up in arms that it had to play the Transformers dvds he bought from Japan.

HTH!

I bring back DVDs from the U.S. every year, and my German colleagues and students like to borrow them. It's important to ask your friend if she has a DVD player that accepts all regions and NTSC backup on her television, as otherwise there will be no color or no picture even if the DVD player has no regional chip. MuttigreeMom's sister and b-in-l probably did the same thing we did: Find out exactly what would accept U.S. norms before buying. Either that, or they lucked out.
DVDs are cheaper in the U.S. than in Germany, so the computer DVD players here will generally only allow you to switch the codes twice before locking in one code. ( I suspect a conspiracy between German software and DVD producers to keep out cheaper imports.) I've had a couple of students manage to lock in the U.S. code, and thereafter be unable to watch European DVDs on their computers/laptops. Some were able to reinstall their software, whereas others weren't. Just an advance warning.
You could also see whether you can get the film with "region 0", which can be played anywhere. My husband buys a lot of concert DVDs, and most of them are "0". I like Easterns, and buy Chinese films here with the "0" code.
Oh, and find out whether your friend already has the film on DVD, because if the original was in English, a German DVD would also have the original version (with or without English and/or German subtitles).