The magic to turn the Philips DVDR7300H into a region free DVD player doesn’t yet seem to be common knowledge, so I may as well report it here. Thanks to the magic of search engines, the information will then soon rapidly spread around the Web.
To make your player region free, first turn it on and ensure there is no DVD in the tray. Then, hit [Browser] on the remote-control. Finally, and without hesitating between each keypress, enter the following incantation:
__[Play] 159 12 12 12 005 255 [Play]__
If you hesitate between any of these keypresses, Error will be displayed in the top right of the screen. If, on the other hand, you enter the above sequence correctly, the player will offer no hint that it has, in fact, positively reacted to your command. UNIX-esque, it is.
Assuming all went well, place in the tray a DVD mapped to a region other than the one for which your player was crippledmanufactured (and don’t use a region 0 disc either, obviously). With a little bit of luck, you should find that it now plays instead of producing an error message.
It continues to irk me that DVD player manufacturers continue to handicap their products in this stupid and ineffective way. Why not just sell the bloody machine region-free in the first place? I know all of the arguments why this isn’t done, but they only hold for a player that is hard-wired to a particular region and can’t be reconfigured.
If you’re going to make it possible to reconfigure the player via the remote control, you may as well supply the unit in an unhandicapped state to begin with; or at least supply the required code in the manual (but that would just serve to indicate how trivial and thus pointless the handicap is in the first place). Information wants to be free, as they say, so those who need a region free player will do the research and, assuming it can be done, find a way to make the player fully usable. They will then tell others. Why make life so awkward for everyone?
Another thing that annoys me: the parasitic shops that charge a €25 to €50 premium for making brand new players region free. All they have to do is plug in the unit and type in the code, but they make it appear to be something requiring knowledge and skill. The disrespect that manufacturers show for us, the paying consumer, is creating the circumstances for this parasitic cottage industry to thrive. It all seems so pointless when the full functionality of the player is but a few keypresses away.