Blu-Ray Region Coding (question) (1 Viewer)

[Sam Favate]

I've seen a number of reviews that state foreign blu-rays aren't always region-coded, despite being labeled Region B or Region C. (One quick example: The Digital Bits confirmed that the German blu-rays of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which list a region code on the package, are in fact region-free.)

My question is: How does one know (without buying the damn thing and finding out the hard way)? Are most like that? Only some?

In particular, I am interested in Lilyhammer Seasons 2 and 3, both of which are listed as Region B.

Any help would be appreciated.

(And I thought region coding was being abandoned when the format switched to blu-ray from DVD. What happened there?)

 

[Bob Cashill]

DVDcompare.net is accurate so far as I know about region coding. It says LILYHAMMER is Region B, so unless you can dig up reviews that say otherwise (and most reviewers don't pay much attention to region coding) I'd say it's Region B.

 

[Jimbo64]

Region coding has been abandoned with 4K discs and that is a huge step forward

 

[Brent Reid]

I'll second DVDCompare: it's the single best disc spec resource on the internet. If you should find a particular release missing, you can always request for it to be added – as well as adding them yourself, of course.
Before buying, aside from a disc's region coding, there are other factors to bear in mind. You might find my simple guide quite useful.

The majority of BDs – certainly well over 50% – are region free, though some of their content may not be suitable for all systems. Though region coding has persisted, albeit to a much lesser degree, throughout the BD era, so far at least, all 4K UHD discs to date have been completely region free.

 

[David Norman]

DVDCompare is very good and includes a lot of other information.

The database entry at Bluray.com is pretty good as well and I've found pretty close to 100% accurate. Sometimes the information can be found in the thread associated with the item even if it hasn't been recorded in the listing

Both sites are limited on number of items and many items haven't been tested or reported. More obscure items often haven;t been tested so still leaves you guessing. Both sites are pretty good at listing things like 50Hz encodes and whether any PAL extras exist.

As an example:
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (German) -- region free, but it's a SD upscale
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (AUS) -- Region Free full HD transfer. Most Episodes are 24Hz, but a couple extra episodes are considered Bonus material and are 50HZ upscales

Lilyhammer -- DVDCompare has a comparison of the US S1 and GemanS1, plus German S2.
It appears the German Studio Canal (and presumably the UK Arrow) releases are all 1080/50 encodes. If I'm reading correctly it appears that S1 and S2 are both B locked which would be typical of SC releases though not 100%.

I can't find any direct information on S3, but I would suspect similar. I can find a thread on Bluray, but nothing specifically addressing hte region coding.

For S2 and S3 it appears to be around $45 shipped from Amazon for the UK sets, and $33-35 for the German pair. There is also a German Complete S1-3 for around $30-31 as well. The biggest complaint I can find was that S2 and S3 didn't have full subtitles for those who need them -- apparently teh English Subs only came up when Norwegian was being spoken

 

[Sam Favate]

This is great information. Thank you to all! I will be consulting DVDCompare, Bluray.com and Brent's guide.