Page 1 of A Pioneer DV-344 and DVDs recently bought in Bali

Hi All,
I was wondering if anyone could help me out with a tricky problem I`ve come across...

I own and operate a Pioneer DV-344 in Australia and i just recently bought some region 3 DVDs on a trip to Bali. They played at perfect quality and in colour in the shop but once brought home only play in B&W. Any ideas on how to regain the colour?

Oh also, I was under the impression that the player was multi-zone. Is there a copy-protection issue here or something?

Any info you might have would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Robin

Not being a techie I reckon you will have to change the output from your DVD player to PAL/NTSC ( if possible). I`ve read some posts that reckon this can be a symptom of the PAL/NTSC settings.HTH

hi,as far as i no there isnt a switch on the back for a converter.i cant realy give u much tech help as we no longer make that dvd palyer anymore(too old)but it sounds like ur having the old psx problem were a scart lead was used to combat the coulor issue.u could try looking for a reagion hack.but the chances r that u cant change the region.once the region has been set by us "http://www.pioneer.co.uk/frameset.htm"then u cant change it back without a mod chip or by re-flashing ur old one :-/

Have you tried altering the Pal/NTSC setting in the setup menu?

Thanks for all the input guys!

I`m not too sure about the pal/ntsc settings. There doesn`t seem to be any place to change it. In the menu under video options the only selections are:
TV Screen
Picture Quality
S-Video Out
On-Screen Display
Angle Indicator

None of these seems to have anything to do with pal/ntsc or region encoding. So any ideas on how to change the setting would be appreciated!

About the zone encoding -> If it was locked to zone 4 would i just get an error or is the B&W a symptom of trying to play zone 3 stuff?

Cheers,
Robin

B%W picture is a syptom of an NTSC signal being played on a PAL TV. More modern UK TVs are able to play NTSC signals correctly too.
The suggestions above are correct - many DVD players have a menu option to do the conversion from NTSC to PAL for you. Looks like the Pioneer doesn`t.
One other thing to try - can you set the SCART connector to output as RGB rather than svideo? (as long as your TV can accept that signal) - that (IIRC) gets around the NTSC thing.

Ok sweeeeet thanks for all the help I finally managed to find my instruction book and the way to change the output system is by holding down >>>> on the front of the player when in standby mode and then pressing the standby button.

Lol never would have guessed it but it fixed the problem.

Thanks again to you all and now i`m off to watch 19 dvds :o)

Cheers,
Robin