onearmedbandit
6th June 2005, 19:05
Was at home on Saturday night with the wife, quiet night in and a DVD. Only problem was, I didn't have a home theater setup. So come Sunday, I nipped out of work and had a look around. Found one that appealed, negotiated a price and bought it. Reasonable unit, not top of the line (don't watch enough TV) but had all the features I was looking for plus a couple of extras.
Got home from work and started to unpack and setup. An hour later, it was all in place, wired in neatly and ready to change our viewing experience. Put a rented DVD in (the one we watched the night before) and sat back. Hmmm, not much happening, except for the "Wrong Region" message on the screen. Somethings not right here, so I repeat the process but to no avail. So I grabbed one of our DVD's and put it in and what do you know, same story.
Now I'm not up to speed on different zones, never affected me before, but I checked all of our DVD's and see they are all zone 4. A quick check of the manual, and sure enough it only plays zone 3's and 'all zone' DVD's. You're fucking kidding me right, I know I didn't ask but I got sold a unit thats no good to me, other than using it to watch TV. So after setting it all up I find I might have to pack it all away again. But surely not, the salesman made no mention of anything to do with this, so there must an answer. And after much swearing I found a piece of paper, not anywhere near where the instructions were, that informed me that to watch DVD's from any zone, open the tray, enter a code number and close the tray.
Elation, my toy does work after all. Only it doesn't. Despite entering the code many, many times it still wouldn't play. I tried every method to get it to read the code, slowly, medium, fast, from right up to the player, from back at my couch, I even hid around the corner so it wouldn't see me and tried to trick it. But no, it won the battle and I was beaten. So I resigned myself to defeat for the time being, and cheered myself up by watching Top Gear.
I rang the retail store this morning (major chain store) and after being transferred to 4 different phones finally got someone who put the phone down and went and asked someone else, I think it was the first person I spoke to. They told me to reset the unit by switching it off for 10 minutes and then re-enter the code, well I left it for 2 hours just to be sure. And sure enough, it still doesn't work. I even started entering slightly different variations of the code, I felt like a crazed man going even crazier.
So after a fruitless search on the 'net, talking to the retailer, and thinking outsde the square, someone at Philips is going to get a pleasant start to their week. :mad:
Got home from work and started to unpack and setup. An hour later, it was all in place, wired in neatly and ready to change our viewing experience. Put a rented DVD in (the one we watched the night before) and sat back. Hmmm, not much happening, except for the "Wrong Region" message on the screen. Somethings not right here, so I repeat the process but to no avail. So I grabbed one of our DVD's and put it in and what do you know, same story.
Now I'm not up to speed on different zones, never affected me before, but I checked all of our DVD's and see they are all zone 4. A quick check of the manual, and sure enough it only plays zone 3's and 'all zone' DVD's. You're fucking kidding me right, I know I didn't ask but I got sold a unit thats no good to me, other than using it to watch TV. So after setting it all up I find I might have to pack it all away again. But surely not, the salesman made no mention of anything to do with this, so there must an answer. And after much swearing I found a piece of paper, not anywhere near where the instructions were, that informed me that to watch DVD's from any zone, open the tray, enter a code number and close the tray.
Elation, my toy does work after all. Only it doesn't. Despite entering the code many, many times it still wouldn't play. I tried every method to get it to read the code, slowly, medium, fast, from right up to the player, from back at my couch, I even hid around the corner so it wouldn't see me and tried to trick it. But no, it won the battle and I was beaten. So I resigned myself to defeat for the time being, and cheered myself up by watching Top Gear.
I rang the retail store this morning (major chain store) and after being transferred to 4 different phones finally got someone who put the phone down and went and asked someone else, I think it was the first person I spoke to. They told me to reset the unit by switching it off for 10 minutes and then re-enter the code, well I left it for 2 hours just to be sure. And sure enough, it still doesn't work. I even started entering slightly different variations of the code, I felt like a crazed man going even crazier.
So after a fruitless search on the 'net, talking to the retailer, and thinking outsde the square, someone at Philips is going to get a pleasant start to their week. :mad: