The DVD Charger review

- the dvd charger -

a review

The DVD Charger is a clever little microprocessor, designed to strap onto a DVD player - the only UK machines supported as yet are the Panasonic A-100 and its clones, and the A-350. Its purpose is to manipulate the region and video data of the player - currently it can set the machine to regions 1, 2, 3 or 4, output in a variety of PALs and NTSC, change the colour subcarrier frequency, set the video black-level, reset the PIN code, disable Macrovision and the Copy Generation Management System. These features are selected from the machine's remote control.

The machine used for this review is an A-100.

Installation.

The 8-pin chip comes supplied with concise and clear installation instructions. All well and good, but the five points on the machine's board which need connecting up are sometimes absolutely minute. The engineer who installed mine has just finished a 4 year electronics course, and said it was the fiddliest wiring he'd ever done!

4 points are on the underside of the board, and it is the first two (surface mount resistors) which are so difficult, partly because they are so close together. Make sure you use a soldering iron with a very fine point and thin solder. After these two, the others are a breeze - the final point sits on a board bolted to the front of the machine. Tape up the chip safe and out of the way, and off you go...

In use

The chip works by interrogating a four figure code used in the audio set-up screen. On the A-100, the machine offers about half a dozen common languages - English, French and so on - and for the more esoteric uses these codes to select them. If you have a collection of Serbo Croat discs, this could be a problem, but for the rest of us, this is just fine and dandy.

To implement a command, you dial in the code, switch the machine off for 10 seconds or so, then switch on again. If you have changed the region of the player, it will "wake up" thinking it is from that region from the word go (ALL region 1 discs play by the way, including Disney et al). All the video commands are on a 15 second time delay to avoid the machine resetting itself - in practice on a PAL TV, this means that for 15 seconds you watch a black and white picture then, voila, it changes to glorious colour before your very eyes. The makers have supplied 5 basic configurations which cover most systems - the two most common in the UK will be "4001" for Region 1 in 60 hz PAL, and "4008" for Region 2 in 50 hz PAL.

What can you say? It works exactly as advertised. Once, when changing the colour system, it seemed to change the region as well, but a quick reset sorted that out. Furthermore, the machine remembers the last setup when you turn the machine off, so you only ever need to change any settings when you switch from a region 1 to a region 2 disc. After the initial playing around, it really is a doddle to use.

It seems that - assuming the chip is correctly installed - you can't damage anything. If a selection causes the TV to lose sync, just enter the setup page (which will be unaffected) and start again. Incidentally, some discs did seem a tad light in the blacks - if this is a problem, simply send a command to set the black level to zero.

Conclusion and ordering details

This is a really useful and nifty bit of kit, transforming a potentially useless region 2 only player into an all-singing, all dancing can do anything in any format player. Congratulations to the folks at PSX-Charger for their stirling programming work.

The only real problem is that ordering the chip is a little cumbersome, since the company do not have a credit card service - the only reliable way I could find to do it was to wire the money via Western Union, at a hefty £17 surcharge. With the chip itself at around £90 in current exchange rates, it ain't cheap, but with A-100s on sale at Richer Sounds for £350, that gives you a very versatile machine for £450, all in. If you have a PAL only TV, this is your best - in fact only - bet for budget code-free operation. It is a shame that there is no-one in the UK who advertises as taking your machine and fitting it for you, but I'm sure that if someone enterprising enough were to contact the suppliers...

For more information, and for full ordering details, visit the company's site here.

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