DVD player region limitations - how to have all regions?

I travel from time to time. I am always restricted from buying dvds in other countries because it doesnt work in my DVD drive (region 1). This wouldnt be a problem if I am allowed to change regions unlimited amounts of time. But we are limited by a fixed number of changes. Personally I dont see how limiting region change benefits intellectual property protection at all, as this was implimented for this reason.

How do you get to have unlimited region changes?

 

I think somebody told me that AnyDVD will allow you play any region.

 

Buy a billion "region control" chip for your DVD drive. When you used up your 6 chance of changing the region setting, open up the dvd drive, unsolder the region control chip and then resolder a new one on. Restart and now you should be back to 6 chance of chaning the region code.

It's there for a reason and is meant not be bypassed. It's also built into the hardware.

They also made it very fair to let you change 6 times because regular DVD players doesn't even allow you to change it.

 

Many interesting opinions regarding this, but it can be summarized real good here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code

Extracted paragraphs:

Purpose:

" There are many purposes that region coding can achieve, but a primary one is price discrimination, the economic principle of demanding a higher price from buyers in wealthier areas. Price discrimination is especially applicable to movies, as the marginal cost of selling one copy (or viewing) is quite small, giving the seller great flexibility in pricing. There is great disparity among the regions of the world in how much a person is willing to pay for a DVD, so region encoding allows a publisher to sell a DVD for less money in the regions where the demand is low and more where the demand is high.

Another purpose is controlling release dates. One of the traditions of movie marketing that the advent of home video threatened is the practice of releasing a movie (to theaters) later in some countries than in others. The threat from video tape was muted by the coincidence that television broadcast standards, and thus video tape formats, were for historical reasons regional; without region coding, the DVD format would be playable everywhere."

Legal Concerns:

" Region code enforcement has been discussed as a possible violation of World Trade Organization free trade agreements or competition law. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has warned that DVD players that enforce region coding may violate their Trade Practices Act. The government of New Zealand is also considering a similar ruling. This means that all DVD players sold in those territories have to be region-free. In the United Kingdom, DVD players are legally required to be region 2.

Movie publishers misused region coding when they released older material with full region coding—there being no requirement, per the stated cinema-blockout justification provided, to restrict sales to certain countries. There are concerns, voiced by the European Union, that region coding was solely an attempt to enforce price differentials."

So to your query, maybe it is time to get a DVD player from Australia.

There are software around that can play any region disks, but it is getting harder and harder to do this with newer disks.

cheers ...

 

Occasionally you can find firmware releases that will set a DVD reader to region 0.

 

Even if you make your drive region free you will still need to by pass the OS region lock. Use Linux.

 

is there such a thing or is this a blatent sarcastic answer? sounds a little rudimentary and barbaric as a solution to have to solder your own microchip...

I would say buy a new drive that you designate as whatever region not your home region. and anytime you feel like watching movies from those regions use the external drive. or maybe you can go first class and buy internal drives for each region that you can hot swap.