Let's watch a tv

It sounds simple to watch a tv. It's quite tricky when you're looking to watch DVDs and game consoles from another country.

We brought all of our gear except for a tv. So we have a DVD player, DVDs, Xbox, wii, cables, etc. We even brought a power converter because we knew these devices wouldn't work on UK power.

I did some research and found its going to be tough. But of course I'll try. First question - where do you buy a tv? Certainly we can order online, but this is a great case where I'd love to walk into a store and ask for help, maybe even bring my DVD player.

I tried a few stores and found decent help at a place called Currys. It seems to be related to PC World, and it's a tiny tiny bit like Best Buy. 3 people there seemed to think the tv would work.

I checked the return policy, then bought a tv. I brought it home and tested it. It has a builtin DVD player, so I tried that first. I grabbed a professional Disney film and a more local Virginia Tech DVD. The Disney film said "unsupported country code" and the VT one showed the home screen, but wouldn't go further. 

I actually opened and read the instructional manuals. They didn't mention country codes or ntsc/pal. So I googled it and sure enough, there were some fancy codes I could secretly press on the remote to unlock the country codes! The VT DVD then worked perfectly! The Disney one played all the previews, but went black for the main movie.

We tried other DVDs and found that older DVDs seem to work, but newer ones are a bit more locked down. So then we tried the Xbox. The home screen came right up, but our controllers are hiding somewhere, so we couldn't get much further than that.

For fun, I plugged in the cable from the wall. We pay for sky tv, but the box for that is also hiding somewhere. I put the cable straight into the tv, it scanned for channels and found them! I know we paid for a tv license and we even transferred it to this address, so I wonder if that's why we have service, or if all those cables just always have a basic service. 

More to come on this, as we keep testing and trying...