Ok, maybe there is no such thing as an international MPEG standard. The situation:
Whenever we try to play a DVD from Europe it does not work. Nothing illegal here, just old movies that were never available here and never will be because they are in foreign languages and, well, too "boring" for youngsters. Then wedding recordings and such.
On the PC all this plays just fine. The DVD spits it back out either with a wrong region message or it tries and tries (letting off some weird chirping noises from the drive) and spits it out with some other error message. Aren't those things to play regular MPEG just like PCs? At least that's what it says in the manual. I've also tried PAL-NTSC conversions and that didn't fly.
The setup here: Magnavox BDP170 upconverting player via HDMI cable into the TV. So it should be able to play stuff that isn't NTSC. I've tried lots of formats from VLC Player such as mp2v and whatnot (if someone knows which one works let me know). Nothing worked here so far. Is the only option really to convert to NTSC or to schlepp the PC into the living room? Wasn't DVD supposed to do away with all this?