Page 1 of Poor Quality Dvd, is it a VCD?

Hi there,

My friend brought a second hand dvd player today and borrowed 3 dvd`s off the bloke he brought it from.

One of these was `Planet of the Apes`, I know this disc isn`t available in the UK or the US yet, but I don`t know how to find out what region it is.

On the dvd case it says the subtitles are available in English, Chinese and Malay and it is in NTSC.

When I tried to play this disc on my player (Wharfdale M5) it seemed to play no matter what region I choose (I played around with this as I was intruiged to where it had come from and was trying to find out what region it was).

The picture quality was poor for a dvd and seemed to be fairly wavey, I am fairly new to dvd`s but am sure I read somewhere that VCD`s are sometimes sold in places like China and Japan as Dvd`s and are poor quality.

Do you think this disc is a VCD (I`m not even very sure what a VCD disc is mind) and thats why it played under any region?

Also is there a way of finding out what region a disc is when it is not written on the disc or the box itself (maybe using a computer program and your DVD-Rom or something)?

Thanks for any suggestions you can give
Lee

A VCD is basically a CC with a movie on it. Normally you have two because a movie wont fit on to one disc. Normally they dont have any extras and there is no region coding either. So if you only have one disc it will be a DVD.

It is probably a region 0 disc. That would be why is it will play on any region setting, as it doesnt check the region settings.

And lastly it is most likely a poor quality pirate copy. The far east is a nototrious place for pirating of videos and comoputer games and the authoritites dont seem to do much about stopping it as it is worth so much money.