pondhopper2014

What of all my movies? I have loads of DVDs here... they won't work on a UK machine, will they? What if I were to burn them to a portable (usb) hard drive - could I at least watch them on a laptop? I know my personal laptop will work, till it eventually *sigh* dies on me... but then what?

SO frivolous, I know... but it's a LOT of movies, mostly documentaries we use for homeschooling and stuff.

ALSO, does anyone know if there is netflix in the UK? Or is the internet not "good enough" for watching movies online?

Questions, questions...

quoll

You can probably get a region free DVD player or, if not, there may be a hack code available to de-regionalise it. There are several "netfix" type options here( not tried them yet)

Mummy in the foothills

Not frivolous at all, I was asking myself the same thing this morning while sorting DVD's into the right covers.
I think you can watch them on your laptop anyway, try them and see. Let me know, I'm too lazy to check . I was going to take our favorites home with us, figured Dh and Dd can still watch them.
Now if I could get a multi region DVD player for cheap over there thats even better.

pondhopper2014

I didn't even know that a multi-region DVD player existed! That would be perfect, then whatever we buy there will also play. Win win! Thanks for the info...

It's a silly thing, I mean, in the grand scheme of things. I'm worrying about little things like replacing books/keeping what I have and DVDs. LOL! We want to purge as much as possible this summer (in yard sales) and next... because after that it's moving time. I don't want to leave it all till next summer and then have to offload everything!!!

(my house looks like I'm moving next week - spring cleaning bug, I guess!)

ElizabethK

I sold most of mine in the yard sale last month as apart from the fact they were all bought in USA, they would have added quite a lot to the weight of our shipment, so I decided to just let them go.

I'm not certain if Netflix is in UK but I know there's something similar as my niece has the ability to watch films on demand there, so that's something I'll be investigating upon my return

Snap Shot

All the dvd's we brought with us from UK to NZ work on the dvd player. I don't know if it's multi-region or just to cheap to be sophisticated ! I purchased it here in NZ.

Our old widescreen t.v. that we shipped with us from Britain has an in built dvd player but the new one doesn't.

How long would it take to save your dvd's onto a USB ? Could you burn them onto cd's once you've moved ?

Just as a by-the-way I've got a gadget to save old photos onto an sd card. Including saving old slide photos. It's not a fast process as I have to do it manually, one by one, let's call it a hobby but it's useful as I can view the old photos on new devices.

Barrybriggs

Yes, you can buy a multi-regional DVD player. A wee bit more expensive than ordinary DVD players. Sony is one company which produces them:

http://www.sony.co.uk/hub/dvd-players

curleytops

Pretty well any DVD player purchased in UK will play your North American (NTSC) DVDs; you're more likely to have bother trying to play UK (PAL) discs in a machine purchased in North America. All the DVDs I brought with me from Canada play just fine in the player hubby already had here. What you have to remember is that your shipping weight can really add up with this sort of thing so depending on your shipping arrangements it might be more practical to copy all onto an external HD along with music, photos etc like many returnees have done.

mikelincs

I agree with the external hard drive thing, however that may mean more difficulty playing them on the TV, we use a WD live box to play movies on the TV, it has replaced out set top box and it can also access BBC iplayer and other programmes via a WiFi connection, just need an HDMI cable to connect. We do download some movies and TV programmes to computer, and then use a flash drive to play them. It will take any USB drive, and we do have an external USB hard drive, they are better because thay are much lighter to transport.

kirstyp

There is Netflix in the UK

broadband speeds vary depending on where you're going to live, but many places now have super fast fibre optic broadband, even in my remote corner of the UK our broadband is fast enough to stream without any problems, and on iPad even a 3G connection can handle it so you should be fine.

pondhopper2014

Great advice here, thanks! I wasn't thinking weight - maybe an external hd is a good idea after all...

pondhopper2014

And on that note... why does everything weigh so much??? (sorry, really? All those books, what's the deal with paper weighing so bloody much?? *sigh* purging purging... )

britwhore

Buy a cheap UK DVD player and google a hack for it. It's super simple and usually consists of pressing certain buttons in a specific order - really simple. Then you have a region free DVD player!! Hurrah!

dunroving

Why buy a more expensive "multi-regional" DVD player when most cheap DVD players can be hacked to play all regions?

ldollard

This site shows all the dvd players that can be region unlocked.

http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks

not all dvd players can be though, so research your future purchase on there.