American train DVDs for Europeans?

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

Hi all,

Living across the big pond and being a fan of american trains I have a problem. Until I can save enough money to a trip to America I am not able to see these “beasts” live. So I guess the next best thing would be to get a DVD featuring them in action. Problem is that all appropriate DVDs I’ve ran into are naturally for region 1 and will not play in my european player. And all the train DVDs sold in Europe are about european trains.

So I’m asking if any fellow european knows/has/etc a DVD about american trains that is available here in Europe.

Thanks in advance!

2

Steam Powered Video sells American DVDs which should be free of region coding.

Steam Powered Video

Another is Van den Burg Beeldproducties who does business as Mixmediastore, click on the USA tab.

They are in the Netherlands but should be easy to work with.

Mixmediastore

Finally there’s Ian Allen Publishing Midland Counties Superstore

Midland Counties Superstore

I have done business with all three of them, but for European DVDs.

3

One solution would be buying another DVD player like we use here. They are inexpensive.

4

I assume you have checked your DVD player for region settings. Some do have the ability to set it to a particular region, so you could then “reset” when you put a U.S. DVD in the unit.

5

Another question of course is, are you trying to watch a NTSC DVD on a player designed for PAL and using a PAL TV, that won’t work. On the only occaison I have tried to view an out of region DVD, I got a message to that effect. If you put a non-region coded PAL DVD into a NTSC DVD player and watch the result on a NTSC all you get is white static screen. My NTSC TV is hooked up to 2 DVD players, 1 NTSC and 1 Worldwide conversion, and 2 VCRs, 1 NTSC and 1 Worldwide conversion. I could manage with just the two conversion players but the NTSC DVD player has a lot more features.

I suspect the problem is that you are trying to watch a DVD encoded in NTSC format using a PAL player, on a PAL TV. Your choices are to;

  1. Buy a PAL encoded version instead

  2. Buy a Worldwide Conversion DVD player

  3. Watch it on your computer using DVD player software.

Except for Pentrex all the big Railroad DVD video producers burn DVD-Rs of some flavor, they cannot region encode these, but they do make a choice to encode them in NTSC or PAL format.