How Hollywood Controls Your DVD player

If you have ever purchased an American DVD movie, you might have been frustrated at not being able to play it in your DVD player.

Consumer DVDs are encoded with DVD Region Locking. This system has been created to control the types of DVD movies that can play on DVD players.

It's all because Hollywood film studios want to be able to control the worldwide release of movies.

Across the globe, DVD movies are released at different times. America and Canada are first, then Australia and Japan six months later, and Europe 12 months later.

To stop DVD movies being purchased in America and then played in Europe before their release date, the American studios created DVD regions.

The regions are as follows:

• Region 1 - The U.S., U.S. territories and Canada
• Region 2 - Europe, Japan, the Middle East, Egypt, South Africa, Greenland
• Region 3 - Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong
• Region 4 - Mexico, South America, Central America, Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Caribbean
• Region 5 - Russia, Eastern Europe, India, most of Africa, North Korea, Mongolia
• Region 6 - China

This region system means that movies from Region 1 (USA & Canada) will not play on DVD players from regions 2-6. You can only play DVD disks that are for your region.

The only way to get around this is to purchase a code free DVD player that can play discs from all over the world. Luckily, many new (and cheap) DVD players can do this. Many retailers will actually give you a code for you to disable the regional coding.

If you are in the market for a new DVD player, make sure it is capable of playing multi-coded disks.