Nothing has impacted the home enjoyment planet quite like DVD. Players and movies have been completely flying away the shelves worldwide as prices keep dropping and buyers keep buying. With superior picture and audio overall performance DVD has spurred growth in home theater exponentially in recent years. whole rooms in many homes are now reserved just for the enjoyment of home theater. However, along with DVD’s worldwide success, arrives its dirty little secret: region coding (also referred to as region lock).
DVD region Code Designations
The DVD world is divided into six main geographical regions, with two additional regions reserved for specialized use.
To keep it simple, this means that DVD avid players and DVDs are labeled for operation on inside a specific geographical region inside world. For example, the U.S. is in region 1. This means that all DVD players sold inside U.S. are made to region 1 specifications. as a result, region 1 players can only player region 1 discs. That’s right, the DVDs on their own are encoded for a specific region. about the back of every DVD package, you will a find a region number (1 thru 6).
The geographical regions are as follows:
REGION 1 — USA, Canada
REGION 2 — Japan, Europe, South Africa, Middle East, Greenland
REGION 3 — S.Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Parts of South East Asia
REGION 4 — Australia, New Zealand, Latin America (including Mexico)
REGION 5 — Eastern Europe, Russia, India, Africa
REGION 6 — China
REGION 7 — Reserved for Unspecified Special Use
REGION 8 — Reserved for Cruise Ships, Airlines, etc…
REGION 0 or REGION ALL — Discs are uncoded and can be played Worldwide, however, PAL discs must be played in a PAL-compatible unit and NTSC discs must be played in an NTSC-compatible unit.
The end result is that DVDs encoded for regions other than Region 1 cannot be played on a region 1 DVD player, also, players marketed for other regions cannot play region 1-stamped DVDs.