hi, my name is randall and i have been looking for information about my problem for a couple of days and have yet to find anything. my problem is this:

i am from australia and i live in the us now. while visiting home recently i purchased a dvd of one of my favorite bands silverchair and expected not to be able to view it on my us dvd player. my friend back home told me he could import it to his computer and send it to me over the internet. he was right i received it as rar files and when i unzipped them they were nrg files. so i used nero 6 to make a dvd image out of them and i can burn it to disc and view it on my computer. the problem is that i cant view it on my dvd player. i have burned other dvds (mostly home movies) that play perfectly on my player. is this due to the region codes i have heard about? or is it the file format the movie is in? i am using dvd-r wich is supported by my dvd player. like i said i have burned dvd that work. it must be somekind of problem with the format. any help will be greatly appreciated! thanks

Is Australia a PAL country? USA is NTSC. That might be the problem.

Also it could be the media you are using too.

If it came from Australia, then it is probably in PAL format. Everything over here in the US is NTSC.

Easiest solution is to buy a dvd player that can handle both types of formats.

so theres no way to convert/change it to work? also, why is it working in my dvd drive?

Format doesn't matter on the computer. There are ways to convert, but it can be problematical.

If you want to try, the easiest method is to use FAVC. You'll need Net 2.0 and AviSynth installed first, but they are free and there are links to them at the FAVC site. http://favcfavc.googlepages.com/

FAVC says it can now import vob files straight from your movie. But I might use Vob2Mpeg first to get it into mpeg2 form first. http://www.videohelp.com/tools/VOB2MPG

Once imported to FAVC, use the HC encoder that is included and set your output to NTSC. Let it reencode the movie.

You lose the original menus doing this, but you can make a new, simple menu in FAVC and put in chapter points as well, though you can only go by time sections and cannot set them exactly where you might want to.

I went the DVD/Divx/USB player route. My RCA DRC285 plays anything.

wow, thanks guys!