DVD
Make your Playstation 3 region free HTG
For the past weeks my girlfriend and I have been on holiday in the USA and Canada which was – of course – awesome. With the cheap dollar/euro conversion and enough luggage space left we decided to do some serious media shopping: DVD’s, Blu-rays (Lost 6 is superb!) and some PS3 games (Playstation Move is fun!). Back home we started using these with our Playstation 3 console. Blu-rays and games worked fine, but the DVD’s refused to play due to a wrong region code. Damn, I totally forgot about this and I just threw away my old region free DVD player a few days earlier. Nice. Blu-rays and PS3-games are by the way always region free.
A quick Google search learned me that I wasn’t the only one with this problem. Sadly, the region code for the PS3 can not be changed. Bummer. The only workaround given was to make a copy of every DVD to a blank DVD and use the copy. Since I didn’t feel much for that (too much work) I found a better way to view your wrong-region DVD’s.
Go to this site and download the PS3 Media Server. This nice piece of software enables you to stream all kinds of media from your Mac/Windows/Linux computer to your PS3. Not only the usual AVI, MPEG or MP4 files, but it also works with DVD’s! Just insert the DVD into your Mac or PC and browse to the files in the VIDEO_TS folder with your PS3. Easy and it works! Okay, you don’t get a DVD menu but who cares, you can finally watch the content.
If your PS3 is connected to your network by Wifi you should lower the video quality settings because PS3’s Wifi is too slow (max 54 MBit/s) to receive all data in real-time, which will make the video playback stuttering. In the ‘Transcoding Settings’-tab I set the maximum bandwidth to 14 and chose keyint=25:vqmax=7:vqmin=2 /* Medium quality for HD Wifi Transcoding as the video quality setting. This setup seems to work fine.
