Afternoon all

I recently aquired a CDV-475 for free, rushed home and amazingly there was a grinding noise and nothing else.

I reattached the disc tray belt and it began to live again.

The issue is I dont have a remote for it and I cant seem to find any information about which remote it should have. Does anyone have any ideas?

Anyway, I bought a bunch of Laserdiscs from eBay and the first one I tried, Men in Black, wouldnt even start. Mission:Impossible was fine though.

Turns out Men in Black was NTSC. Is there a region mod or something I can do to play any disc I throw in the device?

Thanks

You've probably seen this page already:
http://www.laserdiscarchive.co.uk/laserdisc_archive/philips/philips_cdv-475/philips_cdv475.htm

The remote you need to search for is the "RC 5580" - there seem to be a fair few around, they probably last longer than the players

Sadly this is a PAL-only player - it predates the first PAL-NTSC player (Pioneer CLD-1450) by a few years. There's no way it will ever play an NTSC disc On the plus side, it can play all PAL discs, with analogue or digital sound.

Reading a review from 1988, the conclusion was perhaps that it's not the best player in the world, with a rather soft picture, although apparently the picture will be improved if you use the RGB output on the SCART. It will run rather hot (keep the ventilators clear!). If you're planning to play any teletext discs (BBC Videobook of Garden Birds for example) you'll find it'll strip off the teletext information, which caused annoyance at the time it was launched.

Hope you enjoy using it!

You can’t region mod an LD player. All the discs themselves are NTSC or PAL, not just the players.

Digital machines that make the entire video signal themselves from data on a disc, like DVD or Playstation, that’s where region modding became a thing. Therefore the combi decks that do both LD and DVD will often have a region hack that works just for the DVD side if you hear of someone region modding an LD player that’s usually what they mean, that or it’s a Laseractive.

Thanks guys.

Though now I need to look for new LD player to watch all the discs I have bought ...

Ah well, look after the CDV-475, it's a little piece of history. I mentioned reading a review of it, I didn't realise that it can be read online here, LaserDisc Review no. 19 page 17 onwards.

http://magazines.lddb.com/Laser.Disc.Review_UK/1988/Laser.Disc.Review_no.19_1988.12-600dpi.pdf