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dvd

External Sony DVD player stopped working

Another hopefully quick question. My Sony Home Theater for whatever reason, is
suddenly not reading or playing back any of the DVDs I’ve rented or owned. I used
to play DVDs on old
iMac, but can’t figure out how on my new one. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
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Two potentials I could think of:

1. Apple may have stopped external support of that particular DVD player.
2. The DVD player could be Region locked. In an attempt to prevent piracy of DVDs over the years, companies included a setting inside the hardware called “Regions”. This means if you lived in Japan, your DVD player would be set to Region 1 and only Region 1 DVDs would play. Region 2 might be Europe and so on. You could switch the Region of your hardware only a few times then the device would no longer work. This helped prevent people from stealing DVD content across the globe. It was just a big pain in general and it’s starting to disappear although the Video Game industry might still use it with some consoles.

Sony has always been known to do things their own way, meaning they don’t often bow to the industry standards. Example: using Mp2 as their default video codec for many years then people couldn’t read the video files shot on Sony cameras. Example: Sony “memory stick” instead of just using the standard SD card format for many years. Of course Apple is just as guilty as this as well which means when you bring two stubborn companies together you often end up with parts or files that don’t work together as they should.

How do I copy my DVDs?

What are my best choices for getting DVD video imported into my computer?

___________

Couple of methods I use:

1. VLC in combination with Handbrake.

2. Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate.
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