DVD Regions Explained

Simply put, if you buy a DVD in the United States and take it home to England (or vice-versa), you will not, under normal circumstances, be able to play that DVD in your home DVD player.

This is because the world of DVD is divided into six distinct geographical regions. For example, the UK is in Region 2. This means that all DVD players sold in that country are made to Region 2 specifications. Consequently, Region 2 players can only play Region 2 DVDs. As a result, on the reverse of DVD packaging, you should find a region number between one and six.

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 (inc. Mexico)
REGION 5: Eastern Europe, Russia, India, Africa
REGION 6: China

So, for example, the upshot of all of this is that DVDs encoded for regions other than Region 2 cannot be played on a Region 2 DVD player. In addition, DVD players made for other regions cannot play Region 2 stamped DVDs.

In addition to the six geographical regions explained above, three others exist, two of which have no real interest to the average consumer.

The third (Region 0) is useful to be aware of for the reasons specified below.

These additional regions are:

REGION 7: Reserved for unspecified special use.
REGION 8: Reserved mainly for cruise ships and airlines.

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REGION 0 or REGION ALL: Each disc is unencoded and can be played worldwide. However, PAL discs must be played in a PAL-compatible machine and NTSC discs must be played in an NTSC-compatible machine.

You might be wondering why DVD manufacturers in different parts of the world encode their products in this way.

According to the movie industry, the primary reason for this practice is to protect the integrity of their product (the movie), as films are released to theaters at different times in different countries.

For example, a summer blockbuster in the US may not be released in Australia or Japan until the Christmas season. By this time, the US has probably released its DVD version. Hollywood studios would therefore want to protect their overseas profits from the sale of the US DVD to another country, while the movie is still playing in foreign theaters. It also means that your overseas friends or family would not be able to see the movie before its official release in their territory.

While this may be wonderful for the movie executives, who get maximum profits for their movie, it is not so great for the consumer who will have to wait much longer for the DVD release in their country. This may be a justifiable reason, but for some consumers, there are always circumstances where this explanation does not hold water.

For example, many European movies and television programmes are unlikely to be released to DVD in the US because of the probability of low sales, and therefore their release would be deemed uneconomic.

For collectors of this kind of material, there would be no way of playing a DVD release of, say, a TV show from the UK on an American DVD player.

So what's the answer? Read on...

Apart from the movie executives, one of the other main beneficiaries of DVD Regional encoding is the market for what is called either Region Free or Code Free DVD players. These players are usually purchased outside of the United States, as Region 1 DVDs have a high demand in countries where the discs for certain movies have not been officially released.

However, this is can also be true of American consumers (or US immigrant consumers) who want to view foreign material which is unreleased in the American market.

The principal way of obtaining these players is through mail order or from the internet, by way of specialized electronics sites, eBay or Amazon.

When purchasing a code free or multi region DVD player for use in the USA, look for the following:

-- the unit includes a built-in PAL to NTSC converter to ensure trouble free viewing on a standard American TV set.
-- Progressive scan for better picture quality.

{*NOTE: Please take care when purchasing a multi-region or region free DVD player. Ensure that the item you purchase is compatible with your home television system. In the USA, the television standard is NTSC, while in Europe and other parts of the world the standard is either PAL or SECAM. (See below for explanations of these standards).}