Region-free DVD playback on selected HD-DVD players

HD-DVD might be dead but players are still available to purchase both second-hand and new and HD-DVD discs are selling for next to nothing online. My first HD-DVD player was the Xbox 360 add-on which I connected to my HDMI laptop. Playback would sometimes be jerky and the Cyberlink PowerDVD was simply atrocious; some titles would not play and it was generally full of bugs. With a growing HD-DVD collection I took the plunge and ordered a stand-alone HD-DVD from the US courtesy of MovieTyme. The HD-A20 was the cheaper alternative for full 1080p playback; a mid-range model of sorts. Apart from the slow load-up times, after all these are basically computers, I was very happy with the player. It was not until HD-DVD was officially declared dead that I decided to purchase another player, the EP30, at a budget price just in case the A20 was breakdown at any point. I set the A20 up at my parents so that I could make use of the player and made the EP30 my primary HD-DVD player.

I was aware that some clever people had manage to make the first generation models of HD-DVD players, American and European, region free by modifying the official Toshiba firmware. Several weeks later it was revealed that the A20 and EP10, its European equivalent, could also be made region free. Unfortunately, the third generation models such as the EP30 are not included. So, in need of a multi-region HDMI DVD player I decided to turn my A20 from an NTSC region one SD-DVD player into an EP10 multi-region PAL/NTSC SD-DVD player. As I mentioned before, HD-DVD players are effectively Linux computers, and in terms of build the A20 and the EP10 are the same machine.

After finding the region-free firmware through some helpful, friendly people on the AVForums I followed the instructions provided. First you need to downgrade the firmware on the A20 to an earlier version using a disc. Once this is done then you can load the modified multi-region software. It is as simple as that. You now have an American HD-DVD player that can play SD-DVDs of all regions. It is also a pretty good upscaler too, not anywhere near as good as Oppo's dedicated upscaling SD-DVD players but still sound. Another bonus is that you can update the firmware and it will remain multi-region; Toshiba continue to release firmware upgrades even though the players are no longer manufactured. The only downside, and it is a minor one, is that RCE protected region one SD-DVDs require a remote control code to work. Otherwise, if you have a second or first generation HD-DVD player and would like to make it multi-region, head over to the AVForums and do some searching. You never know what you might find.

Broken laptop

Okay, so it is not really much of an excuse for why I have not done a blog post since late July but it is making things a little difficult. Yes, my two year old Sony Vaio AR11S laptop is officially dying on me. I have no idea how it happened but the hinge on the laptop broke and will most likely stay that way as it cannot be fixed. Having to rely on one hinge is not ideal so portability has become an issue. For a £1700 laptop I come to expect more than two years usage. It has been an ideal desktop replacement and ideally it would be good to have it fixed but it looks as if I will be purchasing a new machine in the near future. The slightly off centre screen is a tad off putting and the constant worry that the other hinge could perish at any time is not ideal.

Though it pains me to admit it I think I will be purchasing a MacBook Pro when the new versions are released in late October. Being able to have a fast machine that can dual boot Windows and Leopard will be handy and Final Cut Pro should make fan dubbing a less arduous process. That is not to say that I will be getting rid of my AR11S, it will just have to stay in one location for the time being.

So, in summary, despite the dying laptop I am still blogging and building fan DVDs. Hopefully this will be the start of a flood of new posts. I completed several fan DVDs over the summer and intend to post details shortly.

Fan DVD #10: Death Occurred Last Night (Duccio Tessari, 1970)

Being a fan of Tessari's other gialli, The Bloodstained Butterfly (1971) and Puzzle (1974), and his excellent foray into the poliziesco genre Tony Arzenta (1973) I had always wanted to see Death Occurred Last Night, his first addition to the giallo canon. To my knowledge there has never been an official English friendly release of this the only available version being a poor quality English subtitled bootleg available from Video Search of Miami. Even though I own a copy of the latter I was never able to watch it because of the poor video quality. The excellent Italian DVD label Raro had intended to release the film but it never surfaced. An Italian DVD was released by Ermitage but, again, the picture quality, though better than the Video Search of Miami Bootleg, was still poor. I had intended to use this DVD as the video source for a fan DVD project but Polla of Pollanet Squad was very kindly able to supply me with a rip of a widescreen Italian television broadcast. I enhanced this high quality rip for 16x9 playback and added subtitles which were built by DjangoLi of the Lovelockandload forum. Screenshots can be found below:





As you can see, the station logo is unfortunately burnt-in to the video. I tried to remove it in VirtualDub but the result was not very impressive. Thankfully most of it has been cropped off during the 16x9 enhancement and the remaining half is not that noticeable. Below is the motion menu I created and also a screenshot of the chapter selection menu:

The film, though not as good as The Bloodstained Butterfly which would be Tessari's next entry into the giallo canon, is a gripping police procedural giallo with no straight-razor wielding black-gloved killer to be found. Berzaghi (Raf Vollone) approaches Police Commissioner Lamberti (Frank Wolff) to help find his mentally retarded daughter Donatella (Gillian Bray) who has gone missing. Lamberti, along with his assistant Mascaranti (Gabriele Tinti), begin to search for Donatella whilst Berzaghi continues his own investigation until they both uncover the shocking truth. Death Occurred Last Night is very well acted and well executed. It is a pity that Tessari did not make anymore gialli, his offerings are more thoughtful than the majority. Obviously, it comes highly recommended.

Some of you may have noticed that this is my tenth fan DVD. It is quite fitting that number ten is a Tessari film as my first fan DVD was a fan dub of The Bloodstained Butterfly. I have been quite busy producing fan DVDs over the past few weeks. Look out for posts detailing my 16x9 enhancements of:

Blazing Magnum (1976)
The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968)
Death in Haiti aka Tropic of Cancer (1972)
Spirits of Death (1972)

My next fan DVD will be an English dub of Luigi Zampa's little seen giallo/poliziesco The Masters (1975) starring Franco Nero. I also have a few other surprises up my sleeve.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1975) Fan DVD

I wrote about this forgotten film last year after watching it via a murky avi file. I was very pleased to find that someone has recently built a fan composite DVD of the film using a widescreen French television broadcast and audio from a US VHS. The DVD also includes the original drive-in trailer. Screenshots from the disc are a revelation, no more struggling to see what is going on during the night time scenes.

The only downside is that DVD is only available on the torrent site Cinemageddon. I am no fan of torrent downloads as they seem to take an age but I am currently downloading it. Hopefully it will be finished tomorrow. As the the DVD is non-anamorphic I will be using VirtualDub to crop the video and enhance it for 16x9 playback. I am very much looking forward to seeing this again. Here's hoping that an official DVD release will surface soon.

UPDATE 21/07/08

After nearly two days of downloading I was finally able to build my version of this great fan DVD and am quite happy with the results. I enhanced both the main feature and the original drive-in trailer for 16x9 playback and created some simple menus. Below are some screeshots from my DVD:

I really cannot thank the builder of the original fan DVD enough for making this available to download.

Fan DVD #9: Illustrious Corpses (Francesco Rosi, 1976)

I had been meaning to purchase the Italian DVD of Illustrious Corpses (Cadaveri Eccellenti) for some time only to recently find that it had gone out print. Typical! After months of searching a copy finally showed up on eBay.it; a great resource for those hard to find Italian DVDs and VHS. As the DVD has no English options I was keen to build a fan DVD of this forgotten film. DjangoLi of the lovelockandload forum managed to locate a subtitle file online and was kind enough to make it available for download. Jim Quigley, who built the English subtitles, certainly deserves a pat on the back as this is a dialogue heavy film and it must have took an age to subtitle.

The DVD did not take long to build and was my first attempt at making a dual layer DVD. I also used my new favourite software, VirtualDubMod, to crop and 16x9 enhance the thirty minute extra feature "An interview with Franceso Rosi". Even though the extra feature does not have any English options I still thought that it would be worthy of inclusion. Again, I created a motion menu and used some of the shots of the "Illustrious Corpses" as the background pictures for the other menus. They look quite effective. Below is a video of the motion menu and some some screenshots taken from my fan DVD:








I have not had time to watch the film yet but even though it is little discussed it is one that is highly regarded by those who have seen it. It is also quite hard to classify: is it a giallo, a poliziesco or an Arthouse film? From what I have seen while building the DVD it bears some similarities to Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion (1970), The Masters (1975) and some of the other Italian political thrillers from this period. Plot wise the film is about a detective who is investigating the murders of several respected judges only to find that the Italian Communist Party are involved. Hopefully I will get round to watching it over the next few weeks.

Next up will be a16x9 version of Death in Haiti (aka Tropic of Cancer, 1972) using the colourful widescreen Eire VHS as the source. I had a tinker around with the video in VirtualDubMod and was quite impressed with the results. I might also have a few surprises up my sleeve over the coming month. Stay tuned!

Faces of Death (1978) coming to Blu-Ray

This made me chuckle. According to DVD Review, MPI Home Entertainment will be issuing the notorious former video nasty Faces of Death (1978) in the US on Blu-Ray on October 7th. Of all the titles to be announced so far this one is most certainly the oddest. Any one who has had the (mis?)fortune to see this cult classic will know that the film does not exactly lend itself to a high definition transfer, being a collection of short segments of varying visual quality. Having first seen this on an Nth grade bootleg VHS many years ago it will be interesting to see how it fares in HD. However, I can't exactly say that I am looking forward to seeing a chicken with a severed head dancing around to the tune of 'Old McDonald had a Farm' in 1080p high definition.

Fan DVD #8: The Killer is Still Among Us (Camillo Teti, 1986)

Jay from the lovelockandload forums recently sent me a widescreen, uncut screener of this underrated 1980s giallo. The film itself is based on the unsolved 'Monster of Florence' murders which began in 1968 and were to influence a certain Thomas Harris who created the infamous character Dr Hannibal Lecter. Most reviews of the film tend to focus on the nastier elements such as the graphic murder scenes but there is more to this rarely seen thriller. In style it is more reminiscent of a television film than any of the quintessential gialli of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Christiana, a criminology student researching the case, becomes highly involved in the case, receiving threatening phone calls and begins to suspect that her boyfriend Alex might be the murderer. But is he? There are some nicely shot scenes such as the one where Christiana is terrorised in her apartment and the seance scene, which although seemingly out of place with the rest of the film leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. The murder sequences are well filmed and very realistic. Even the most desensitized horror fan might wince during the final scene. Surprisingly scripted by legendary giallo screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi and well directed by Camillo Teti, whilst no masterpiece there is much more this film than its violent set-pieces.

After a long wait I first viewed the film last month via an English subbed avi made by lovelockandload member Luca Caneli. The source for the avi was the fullscreen Italian VHS which, although uncut, was overly dark, so much so that it was difficult to make out what was going on during the darker scenes. The widescreen screener I received was in similar shape seemingly taken from a print that was not in pristine condition. After viewing the fan DVDs of Queens of Evil (1970) and Formula for a Murder (1985) which used widescreen VHS as the source and were 16x9 enhanced and slightly remastered I have wanted to try my hand at producing something similar. The Killer is Still Among Us presented the ideal opportunity for such an effort.

To 16x9 enhance and remaster the video I used VirtualDubMod, a modified version of the original VirtualDub software which offers MPEG-2 support. I was surprised how easy it was to crop and 16x9 enhance the video and also alter the contrast and overall brightness of the image. Within two hours I had edited, mastered and encoded the new MPEG-2 file. Unfortunately it is still overly dark during the night scenes but is now a little better than the original source. Subtitles were a pain to synchronise as per usual but they seem to be timed correctly. Again I used DVD Lab to build the final DVD and create a motion menu. Below are some screenshots taken from my DVD:





And here is the motion menu:



Next up will be fan sub DVD of the forgotten poliziesco Illustrious Corpses (1976). I was finally able to purchase the out of print Italian DVD and hopefully it will arrive this week. Also on my list is Duccio Tessari's Death Occured Last Night (1970). I would like to work on some other 16x9 enhanced versions of gialli taken from widescreen VHS. Any suggestions?

UPDATE: How to rip a DVD audio commentary and convert it to MP3

Yes, it has been almost a month since I last posted here. I'm currently drowning in a sea of student marking and frantically trying to finish chapters for a book with a deadline fast approaching. Blogging has been the last thing on my mind right now. I'm back, for the moment anyway, and thought I would update a tutorial I posted last year. I continue to listen to MP3 rips of DVD audio commentaries when driving to and from work. Originally I posted a tutorial using DVD Decrypter and the audio encoder BeSweet but have since found a slightly more efficient way to produce better quality rips. Whilst BeSweet is a useful piece of software it is well known for for producing encodes with low volume. The process I will discuss here is still rather time consuming but until someone writes a program similar to iCommentary software available for the Mac this, in my opinion, is the best way.

Here is the updated post. If anyone knows of a better way to do this please let me know.
How to rip a DVD audio commentary and convert it to MP3

I wonder how many people who purchase DVDs actually make use of the special features? Some DVDs contain an extra two discs of further content that offer a complete breakdown on the film's production or specific documentaries that attempt to contextualise the film. It is very rare for me to view the special features of a DVD unless they are of great interest. One feature that I used to never find time to listen to is the audio commentary. Yes, there are some that I have listened to while watching the film but others are often ignored. So, in an effort to make use of these audio commentaries, I decided to rip them from DVD and convert them to MP3 so that I could listen to them on my MP3 player whilst driving to work. So far I have listened to two Shane Meadows and Paddy Considine commentaries, several John Carpenter commentaries and some from the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series. But how do you rip an audio commentary from a DVD? In this blog post I will offer a short tutorial on how this is done. But before we go any further I should add that the ripped files should be for your own personal usage, after all, you have purchased the DVD and are just finding another way to listen to an audio track.

Firstly, before you can get started you need two integral pieces of software: DVD Decrypter and Goldwave. The former is no longer readily available due to legal infringements but can be easily found via a Google search. The latter will convert the ripped DVD track from .vob to .mp3 and can be downloaded for free from here. Some users may need the Lame MP3 codec if they do not have it currently installed on there machine. This can be downloaded from here. Once you have these pieces of software you are ready to begin.

Insert the DVD in your DVD drive then start up DVD Decrypter. Make sure DVD Decrypter is in IFO mode (see picture below). Then, in the Input tab, highlight the stream that contains the main feature. It is usually in VTS_01 and can be identified easily by the running time.


Once you have done this go to the 'Stream Processing' tab. Now you will need to deselect all of the ticked boxes except the one that contains the desired audio track. Sometimes good DVD Authorers will indicate which one of these tracks is an audio commentary using the words 'directors comments' as shown in the screenshot below. If this is not included you will have to work it out for yourself. If there is more than one commentary on the disc that you would also like to rip just select the additionally required tick box.

Now you have chosen which audio track you want to rip you need to make sure that in the box underneath 'Stream Processing' you have selected 'Demux'. Then it is time to click on the DVD to hard drive icon and begin ripping the audio track. Depending on the length of the audio track it can take anywhere between 15 to 20 minutes.

Now open the ripped .vob or .ac3 file in Goldwave.


Next we need to normalize the wave to increase the volume. Click on 'Effect', highlight 'volume' and click on 'Maximize Volume'.


A box will now open for you to select the level of volume. Click on the drop down menu and select 'Default'. Now click on 'OK' and wait while the effect is processed.


You will now notice that the sound wave on screen is much higher than previously.

All we need to do now is click on 'File' and choose 'Save As'. The 'Save Sound As' dialogue box will open. In the 'Save As Type' drop down menu choose 'MPEG Audio (*.mp3)' and then in the 'Attributes' drop down menu choose the required bit-rate. I find 128kbps to be more than sufficient for audio commentaries. Now click on 'Save' and wait for the encoding to finish.


And there you have it, an MP3 track of an audio commentary that you can listen to on your computer or MP3 player. There are some other ways to do this, and although it takes 30 minutes to complete this process I have found it to be the simplest way to rip an audio commentary unless anyone else has any other suggestions?