HOW TO: Cheat DVD Regional Encoding
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 U.S. before the same movie is released to theaters in France, DVDs of the movie imported from the U.S. 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. Cheat DVD Regional Encoding / Wired How To’s