I LOVE MY Classic DVD-40!!! It is the best DVD player
I have used so far for an absolutelly incredible price!
Here's the story. I saw the
advertisement for this unit at BrandsMart (Florida). It was sold
for $48. Believe it or not. Of course it looked like bait-n-switch
to me. But I did go to the store and bought one. They had hundreds
in stock. After I got it home I looked at it and started feeling
better and better about it. It's slim, light weight, and it promises
to play MP3 files too. WOW.
IT DOES. It plays DVDs, AudioCDs,
MP3, SVCD and God only knows, slices of Bologna too. This units
played DVD roms that other players would not even recognize.
It played a DVD that would not even load in any DVD player on
my computer, not to mention the conventional TV units.
And do you know what?
It's 100-240VAC compatible,
and it's PAL and NTSC compatible, meaning it plays to both PAL
and NTSC televisions (or VCRs for that matter).
I love the menus. It allows
me to even set the brightness and contrast of the picture and
change the volume. It does play MP3 flawlessly. the only thing
that could be improved is the way files are listed as 7 chars
titles... that could have been made a little friendlier. Oh,
but what the hell?
Now, the only downside of it
is that there seemed to be no hint on the net about changing
region settings or disabling the annoying macrovision. I have
an old TV that hates macrovision. The top of the screen just
bends and the picture turns dark and bright intermittently just
like it is supposed to happen if you try to make a tape of a
protected DVD of VHS. Well, you know what? I want to be able
to watch the DVDs I buy on whatever TV I want, and so it is war
to macrovision.
I had to open the unit and find
the Eeprom chips to discover something interesting. There is
an ALI M5705 chip on which you can find documentation easily
on the web, and the software code is V56S 2.03. With that in
mind I just typed in V56s and ... surprise! Plenty of results
about both region settings and macrovision.
The unit is sold otherwise by
Mustek as V56, V560, and the modification is as simple as it
could be.
Get the remote in your hands
and follow along. Nothing could be easier:
TO CHANGE
REGION SETTING
make sure there is no disc inside
(actually, as long as you are in STOP mode, it works just fine
even with a disc loaded); wait until the unit is idle (no disc)
or at least it's not trying to load a disc.
press setup
press NEXT PREV NEXT PREV
on the remote until ver 1 (ore ver 2,3,4) shows up
Now press The left arrow
key (the blue buttons around the red one) on the remote and change
to 255 for all regions enabled
DONT EXIT THE SETUP MODE,
we'll just keep going...
TO DISABLE
MACROVISION
Press the UP arrow to
show VER 4001
press the RIGHT arrow
to change it to VER 4000
Press the UP arrow to
show VER 3001
press the righ arrow to
change it to VER 3000
NOW YOU CAN EXIT by pressing
SETUP twice.
You're all set. Your player
will now play anything and macrovision will be disabled. Just
remember: whatever you do, you do at your own liability...
My suggestion: If you ever run
across any more of these little wonders, don't hesitate; and
if the price is right, buy as many as you can. They'll make a
great gift for anybody.