Just spent the day watching the NPU reed making DVD’s. Great stuff - lots of detailed insights, and interesting points regarding the scraping of slips, tying on of slips, rolling staples, use of gouges, knives, other reed making equipment, sanding, tuning of bass drone reeds, making composite cane & plastic drone reeds, etc. are made. These DVD’s and booklet are a fine tool for uilleann piper’s outside of Ireland, in isolation etc. who want to make their own chanter and drone reeds. A fine compliment to Dave Heagaty’s book.
Sounds good, do they still do the reedmaking kit that they were selling earlier in the year??? 
STILL can’t log on to NPU website 
Come on, NPU, fix that menu problem!
How much does NPU charge for the DVD?
Thanks,
The DVD’s & booklet cost 60 euros, or 50 euros plus postage if you’re a member. Well worth the money I think. Each pipe/reed maker explains for an hour how they go about making a chanter reed and a drone reed. Inspiring I found, the different approaches and ideas used to go about making a chanter reed, small details here and there which each of the reed makers consider important are explained, and motivated very intelligently and modestly, yet at the same time none of the reed makers claim that just their way is the only way to go about making reeds. Thanks a lot NPU for making this available. Yes, NPU do the reed making kit
Brian, do you have Norton Internet Security? There seems to be an issue with that, my brother found it and waved his magic IT wand and hey presto I can now get the NPU site up. If you do have Norton, I’ll ask him what he did and relay it to you.
cheers
Mark
DJM had written in a previous post that he was not able to view the DVD (North America). Anyone else in North America have that problem? I suspect Sweden is included as part of the the European DVD region, so it would work there.
Thanks, KB!
That works for me!
Gee I wonder who might be able to transcode that pesky PAL format DVD into NTSC… Oh yeah, that would be me… Too bad I don’t have a copy of the DVD.
OK - this is weird… the link KB provided works if I click on the link he provided… but when I saved it as ‘Favorites’ and then click on it, it doesn’t work…
Brian
Try this if you have Norton:
1/ open up Norton internet security
2/ click on options tag and then internet security
3/ click on web content tab
4/ click on add site and type in the normal url for NPU and click OK
5/ select the url you have just added and on the first tab global settings, there should be 5 options the top 2 click default settings and the bottom 3 click permit.
6/ on the user settings tab click permit for everything.
7/ on the ad blocking tab click add and then add the following clicking on add for each:
.lasso
/ads.
/en
/en/*
/en/default.lasso
permitting these 5 things removes the issue with NPU’s site and Norton.
best wishes
Mark
just to add that you might have to clear your cache out aswell
I was going to post this on the previous thread, but since everyone is now using this thread I’ll post it here.
Okay, what I have been doing is reading (and reading and reading …) about DVD stuff and after loading some DVD utilities to diagnose my problems I have discovered the following:
1). The folks who made the DVDs for NPU have used some newer encoding software that my old stand-alone DVD player attached to my TV doesn’t recognize. I had the same apparent problem with the DVD-ROM on my PC.
2). What I eventually discovered is that software players like RealPlayer, QuickTime, and WindowsMediaPlayer all rely on a separate piece of software called an MPEG decoder. None of these software applications come with their own decoder. You have to buy it separately (not the same as the decoder ring you get in cereal boxes). I had a version of this, but it apparently is out of date. I purchased the latest version of CyberLink’s PowerDVD (US$15) as recommended by Microsoft. Ta-da! I wish WinMediaPlayer had simply told me that’s what it needed.
3). DVDs may or may not have DVD Region encoding, designed to prevent people in Asia from pirating commercial movie DVDs. North America is DVD Region 1. Ireland is in the European DVD Region 2, etc. However, I have downloaded software that overcomes RPC-1 and RPC-2 versions of DVD Region control and tested. I have discovered that I do NOT need to worry about DVD Region controls on the NPU DVDs. They play fine without it.
I guess I will have to purchase a newer DVD player for my TV if I want to be comfy watching this riveting account of the trials and tribulations of reedmakers in their heroic efforts to stave off Nazi invasion forces with … oops! sorry, got carried away.
Anyway, hope that helps. If I scared you off buying the DVDs earlier I apologize. I hope this note assists you if you run into similar problems to what I experienced.
djm
The are brilliant indeed.
Yikes! $82 US seems a bit steep - I assume that doesn’t include shipping either? While I’m sure it’s a great show, I’ll wait for it to hit the local video store at that price. 
Mark,
Thanks for the tip re: Norton. I’ll try it later today.
Just tried this with the “s” on the end of “http” and it works.
Then I tried it without, and it didn’t.
Perhaps this is the answer to NPU’s problems with the website?
At their request, I’ve sent this along to NPU to see if they can sort it out, and hopefully it will.
Thanks to KB for a link that works!