The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) Blu-ray

[Darrel_Griffin]

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) Blu-ray

https://www.dvdcompare.net/comparisons/ ... ?fid=28161

- Effectively region ALL. It is Region B - but on both region A and C players, when it gets to the lock screen, pressing TOP MENU button bypasses this and goes to the main menu.
- runtime: 125:21 NOT 125:17
- booklet is 52 pages


-
source: I own it

[Eric_Cotenas]

The top menu trick only works on certain players and brands, so it is not ALL region.

[Darrel_Griffin]

Are you sure?

I found this out by chance, when loading the disc with my player set to the wrong region, but I also checked on Blu-ray.com, and 2 people on there say it works:

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Priv ... gionCoding

"Tested on PS3, PS4, Samsung, and Magnavox players."

My player is a Panasonic, with manually switchable region setting, so it is effectively a Region A Panasonic / Region B Panasonic / Region C Panasonic, depending on the setting.
I tried Regions A and C, and the trick worked for both. For Region B it goes straight to the menu page as normal.

Obviously there is no way I can personally check all brands and models of player, but are you aware of any for which it does not work?

[Eric_Cotenas]

The top menu trick works on Panasonic in general but never Sony Region A (whose players have to be hardware hacked to change regions). Sony Region B players can do this with some Region A titles but sometimes cannot get further than the main menu.

If it works on PS4, then it is an authoring flaw specific to this release (like Night of the Shooting Stars in the Arrow Region B Taviani set whose other titles did not allow this). It does not generally work with Eureka - I’ve tried - or other Region B titles on Sony or Philips players (otherwise there would be no need for region-switchable players if top menu worked on all players).

The fact that there is a region mismatch page you have to bypass makes it still Region B, but we can mention that the top menu trick works in this case even with players on which the trick normally does not work (although there is the chance that it might not work on some brand based on the player’s loading interface (some older Sony BD players do not even load the mismatch menu screen but stay on the player input menu with region b discs). I’ll see if i can find my copy and try it with one of my Sony players.

[Darrel_Griffin]

In my experience, this "Top Menu" trick does NOT usually work in general on either of the 2 Panasonic players I have owned. It only works on certain specific releases, when there has been an authoring error (or an intentional "back door" created), which is relatively rare, and no, I don't think it works in general for Eureka releases, just this particular one.

I have previously found that it works for the Mill Creek Blu-ray of Krull:

https://www.dvdcompare.net/comparisons/ ... ?fid=28994

[Eric_Cotenas]

Tested it on my Sony UHD and the top menu trick works for this one but no other Eurekas I have tried. It's still Region B, but I have added the top menu comment in the notes.