FREEDOM! Yeah!
IT WORKS! I got a region-free DVD player the other day. It didn’t work at first, but there’s a firmware upgrade, and now I’m 100% region free. I asked Walde to bring over his most diabolically formatted DVDs to test. He produced a disc that was the “perfect storm” of DVD incompatibility: A region 2, PAL, anamorphic wide screen disc. And it played perfectly!
I believe it is every American’s patriotic duty to circumvent DVD region lockout, or any other artificial limitations put in “consumer” products. Crippled technology sucks!
If you’re interested, this player that works for me is an RJ Tech RJ3700, and we got it from Sina.com. It came with two “free” karaoke microphones. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.
Like I said, it didn’t work out of the box, but there’s a firmware upgrade available from the manufacturer. The instructions for how to burn the firmware to a CD were very vague, but I happened to find this set of instructions for a Polaroid player that must use the same chipset or something. I had success using the firmware provided by RJ Tech, but burned and loaded using the instructions provided by Polaroid.