Just picked up a DVD recorder for the TV, yesterday. Personally I have pumped for the most kitted out, but my girl friend is more rooted in real life and points out that most of the feature rich ones are still quite expensive.
Looks a nice piece of kit, and seems to be reasonably good €129 (Dec 2008). Have yet to try out the recording features, but it already does one thing that I really wanted, play region 1 DVD’s. 
Of course I did have to unlock it to do that.
Why Unlock?
Probably a question used by legal people to suggest that it’s somewhat illegal. Basically region locking is only present to allow for artificial control of markets and to try and prevent the natural economic laws of supply and demand from equalizing prices all over the world. You’ll hear sometimes the arguments that people in some regions can’t afford the true price and so the publishing houses need to be able to sell them for cheaper there. That’s a load of crock, if they don’t make money from it, they won’t sell them. It’s always been a question of how much they can jack up the prices in the regions where something is known to be popular.
For me, the main reason is that the selection of anime made available as region 2, is pretty dire. Since I use Linux and watch a lot of my DVD’s on the PC, I had built up a collection of region 1 anime that has not been released in region 2 (or at least has not been made available within the shops that I have access to). Thankfully Linux is capable of completely by passing the region codes on all DVD’s, not to mention able to skip sections that the DVD producers are obliged to force you to watch. You know the parts, the copyright notices, the Dolby Digital snippet, etc. Once you’ve seen one, you don’t really want to watch any of the others.
Unlocking
The unlocking procedure is very straight forward, in fact I suspect that the unlock codes are available for just about all DVD player’s and recorders currently available. Original link http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks?dvdplayer=Philips+3480&hits=50.
- Turn on DVD recorder with no DVD inserted
- Press ‘Setup’ on remote
- Enter the following numbers slowly (should see an X appear on the screen for each one)
- 5, 0, 8, 1
- This will bring up a maintenance screen that is used to set the region code
- Press ‘0′ to change the region to All
- Press ‘Ok’ to confirm
- Insert your DVD’s from around the world and enjoy