How to Cheat DVD Regional Encoding
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You might think a DVD is just a DVD, and that it will play in any DVD player. Unfortunately, you’re wrong. The film industry has segregated the world into seven “regions,” and DVDs are generally encoded for playback in only one region.
Ostensibly, the studios do this because feature films are rarely released on the same date in different regions of the world. If a DVD comes out in the United States before the same movie is released to theaters in France, DVDs of the movie imported from the United States could hurt ticket sales of the movie in French theaters. In other words, DVD region encoding exists primarily to protect the movie studios’ physical distribution system.
What’s more, there have been accusations that region encoding creates an illegal price-fixing structure that can be enforced by region. So far, this argument hasn’t made it in front of a court, but New Zealand has been lobbying heavily to eliminate region codes on price fixing grounds.
As it stands, if you’re on holiday in Paris and you pick up a copy of the new Harry Potter movie, you’ll have yourself a nice $20 coaster when you get home. Luckily, region encoding isn’t a complex process. In fact, it’s just a single byte at the beginning of the disc, which means it isn’t hard to get around.
- 1. Regions
Before we get started here’s a quick overview of the regions that Hollywood has come up with:
REGION 1 — USA, Canada
REGION 2 — Japan, Europe, South Africa, Middle East, Greenland
REGION 3 — S. Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and parts of Southeast Asia
REGION 4 — Australia, New Zealand, Latin America
REGION 5 — Eastern Europe, Russia, India, Africa
REGION 6 — China
REGION 7 — Reserved for Unspecified Special Use
REGION 8 — Reserved for cruise ships, airplanes and the like
REGION ALL — Uncoded discs that will work anywhere
2. Hardware solutions
Perhaps the easiest way around region encodings is to just buy a region-free player. A quick web search will turn up a number of manufacturers that have declined to accept Hollywood’s region plans.
But what if you’ve already got a nice DVD player or you want to use the disc on your PC? Well there are a number of hacks that you can use to turn off the region encoding in your DVD player. For a complete list check out Video Help or use the site to search for your DVD model to see if there’s a solution available.
Note that hacking your DVD player to circumvent region encoding technology is a violation of the DMCA, which means it’s illegal if you’re living in the United States. Those living in the free world shouldn’t have too much trouble.
- 3. Software Solutions
If you live in the United States or if you simply want a solution that will work on any DVD player — even those which haven’t been hacked — your best solution is to burn a copy of the movie. You must understand that this is currently illegal in the United States, though Fair Use provisions may be used to argue that consumers can make backup copies of media they own in the future.
With that in mind, what you’ll want to do is rip a copy of your DVD using one of the many popular ripping programs on the market (we suggest ImgBurn on Windows and Mac The Ripper for Mac). Make sure that you set the ripping software to produce a “region all” file and then, when you’ve got a copy on your hard drive, burn a new DVD using software like Toast (Mac) or Nero (Windows).
The result will be a DVD that works as you would expect — in any player, anywhere. Well, almost any player. There’s one gotcha that might be a problem for some users, but there’s little you can do about since it involves video playback.
4. NTSC versus PAL
There are two major formats for video playback in use today: PAL, which is popular in Europe and parts of Asia, and NTSC, which is used in North America, Japan and some other markets.
Keep in mind that PAL discs must be played in a PAL-compatible DVD players and NTSC discs must be played in a NTSC-compatible DVD players. There are some DVD players that can handle both, and there are some software applications which can convert a PAL DVD to NTSC (or the other way around) during the ripping process.
But if you don’t want to spend a lot of time ripping your DVDs, it might be worth spending some extra money to get a DVD player that can handle both formats.
