British Shows and Movies We Are Missing and How You Can Watch Now

I love good British ironic humor and the witty way they put things. It is on the corky side and it is the same reasons I love Better off Ted (a short lived NBC show) and Parks and Rec (an NBC show now entering its 3rd season) and Ctrl a short web that only ran one season.

There are plenty of UK shows and movies I'd love to see because they have my favorite actors in them, but there is a problem...Different countries hold back their release dates. A movie that is just going into the movie theater here might be being released on DVD somewhere else so to stop people from seeing the movie or heaven forbid pirating the movie before it even comes out in their country they encode the DVD players to be Region specfic. Canada and the USA are region one, the UK is region 2 and it goes all the way up to six. But there are ways to get around this.

I love this show, I've seen all of the four seasons via Netflix and I own the first two seasons, here's hoping I get season three for Christmas.

UPDATE

I now have all four seasons. The last season I bought for myself.

If you are rereading this, I wrote this in direct response to the fact that I couldn't watch the things I wanted to see and have now learned a new way to see Region 2 DVDs and I am happy yo say I have now seen this one.

I was waiting to see this movie for over six months, being that it was clear it might never be released in the US region, I bought it from Amazon.com and had it shipped from the UK. Recently a good friend of mine told me that you can change the region code on your computer, but you can only do it four times and whatever it is on the fourth time you are stuck with forever or the life of your computer. I watched and loved this rather short 80 minute movie. I'd love to see more like it.

Some Blu-ray disk are now Region free, but not the pricey players, unless you buy it that way or are lucky enough to buy one and get a system upgrade to region free which I think might be rare and or expensive. More Blu-rays work in most blu-ray players because there are only three region codes vs. DVD which has six, but they won't play normal DVDs from other regions. If you're thinking you can skate by with the transferable digital movies that come with it you might be sadly mistaken, unless you own an expensive sony psp player or an equally pricey ipod player you can't watch them on the ipod, even then you have to have itunes. Itunes will even hold your movie hostage unless you link a credit card to your itunes account, for a movie you already own. These movies also expire and then can't be downloaded.

If you liked Downtown Abbey and you already have a blu-ray you can watch the entire set on this Region Free DVD straight from the UK, but buy it from Amazon Prime, because if it doesn't work you can send it back and they'll pay the shipping unlike ebay.

By the way Downton Abbey about a wealthy family and their servants in 1900s, is awesome. You can see season one on Netflicks, Amazon Prime and Hulu.

What can you do about it, you could just wait for your favorite show or that movie you've wanted to see for ages to come out here, but the truth is some movies will never be released in the US. I've been waiting a year for this one movie I want to see, it came out 2009 and there is no date for it to be released here in the theaters or on DVD. I have friends who have been waiting years to see their favorite British shows make it to the US. Even if it is in your region there is no way of knowing if you will come across it. I had to special order the Bumble Bees Flies Anyway from Canada for my friend's birthday one year, because they simply stopped making it here.

This is an Amazon pic from Lost In Austen, A movie I waited about a year to see. I bought it as soon as it came out on Region 1, and have never regretted it, it is a good movie.

You can find some hacked numbers on the web or buy a DVD program to un-encode your DVD player so it will play any region you want. If you have an older player like mine, it might not work.

My DVD player is a eight year old Sanyo, they don't make them as sturdy as this anymore. That also makes them less hack-able. I'm only glad I haven't had to replace it, like I would have if I had waited a few years to buy one.

If neither of those options are good for and you still want to see new and exciting entertainment, you can buy a region free or code free DVD player, these players were probably first built for people who were moving across the world and didn't want to buy all their favorite movies again. You can buy one of the standard home theater models or buy a portable one, the best part is no matter were you go all you have to do is buy an adapter for your DVD player and you can watch your favorite movies or even rent movies when you are in a place like England or Ireland. I use those as my examples, because despite trying to learn French, English is all I speak.

You can also order movies online and not from some website you don't know or trust, there is a UK Amazon and a German Amazon site, there are more, I surfed a few extra just for this lens. I found the German site when I was trying to get a hold of the German version of one of my favorite movies, since the special features were in English and subtitled in German. Alas it was not to be, they stopped making that version and I will never see All the Queens Men's special features. I don't want you to miss out like I did. You can even find Region 2 DVDs on the US Amazon site.

There are more than 5 Amazon sites operating throughout the world. These are the non American sites I was able to find while surfing around looking for unusual Region 2 movies to put in this lens.

http://www.amazon.co.uk United Kingdom

http://www.amazon.de Germany

http://www.amazon.fr France

http://www.amazon.it Italy

Amazon.es Spain

Be careful, UK 15 is our rated R, only for swearing. It was still a great movie, they said the F word three or four times.