I'm having no luck purchasing "Der 90 Gerburtstag" or Dinner for One
starring Freddie Finton from the 1960s in American VHS or DVD format.
Any ideas of where it might be or how I might get it? This is shown in
Germany (in English, I believe) each New Year's day.

Hi,

This British film, entitled "Dinner for One", is available for
purchase from Amazon.com's German website - amazon.de, in VHS or DVD
format.

Here is the URL for that page: http://tinyurl.com/27s3y 


Search strategy:
Searched Google for:
Dinner for one VHS
"Der 90 Gerburtstag"

See also http://www.new-video.de/film-dinner-for-one-oder-der-90ste-geburtstag/
(German - use Google or Babelfish to translate)

ottawabrain:
The customer asked for "American VHS or DVD format."  The videos from
Amazon.de are not American format.

In the UK, most new VHS equipment play & record PAL; and play NTSC.

Similarly, most new DVD players have either multi-region capability or
can be fixed.

I would guess that some of the VHS equipment in North America could
play a German video. Am I wrong?

Normally at an electronic stores in the US you can only buy NTSC
format equipment (VHS) and region 1 DVD. SO if it falls in that
catagory then it would be able to play in US Spec video equipment.

X

The industry invented region encoding for a reason. They consistently
fight any attempts to market multi-region players, and thus they are
certainly not standard.

There are further problems when it comes to playing PAL videos in an
NTSC system. Video recorders that handle both formats are reasonably
common in England but very rare in the US.

Hi, Poe

As a fellow Englishman, I feel I can talk to you man to man.

There is one very successful specialist chain in England that majors
on multi-region DVDs so, if 'the Industry has been consistently
fighting' they have clearly failed to draw blood.

This outfit also backs up its claims with an excellent warranty.

All the Best

Bryan

TO POE-GA

ALL DVD PLAYERS ARE CAPABLE OF PLAYING ANY REGION.

DVD players arn't MADE locked to any particular region,

In fact their are many Websites where you can look up the make and
model of your DVD player and it will then give you a code to tap into
your DVD player via the remote control which will then Unlock your DVD
player to all regions within a couple of seconds.

Region coding is just an Gimic by companies eager to make more money
from the public and will end soon.

The video was available in NTSC format some time ago, i.e. according to:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121210/sales

However, "THIS TITLE IS CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE":
http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004RPLR/imdb-jp-23/702-8179045-7725664

A webpage mentioning the available books, DVDs etc.:
http://mitglied.lycos.de/ssskol/bib.html

Well, here is a short excerpt:
http://www.ndr.de/cgi/media/003366/ffffff/ffffff/ndr/ndrvideo//video/vs/20031231_dinner_for_one_winterbottom_3.rm

Yah, they used to show it on New Year's in South Africa too. Strange
how it never stops being funny, no matter how many times you see it!