While the information in this post probably won’t help 99% of you, its still kinda neat to know. Almost every DVD player on the market is coded for a specific region of the world. Now the thing with this is, only DVD’s with the same region code as the DVD players will work. If your DVD has a different region code than your DVD player, you out of luck, it isn’t going to play. The regions are listed below:
- 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 (including Mexico)
- REGION 5 — Eastern Europe, Russia, India, Africa
- REGION 6 — China
- REGION 7 — Reserved for Unspecified Special Use
- REGION 8 — Resevered for Cruise Ships, Airlines, etc…
- REGION 0 or REGION ALL — Discs are uncoded and can be played Worldwide, however, PAL discs must be played in a PAL-compatible unit and NTSC discs must be played in an NTSC-compatible unit.
If you live in the United States, your DVD Player will probably be Region 1. If you bought DVD from Japan (say an Anime DVD), its probably a Region 2 DVD and its not going to play. Why did they come up with this system? I don’t know, but my guess is it’s supposed to help curb video piracy or something, but there it is. They do sell region free dvd players, but usually for an expensive price. Most computer DVDRom drives can have the region setting changed, but only 5 times before its locked on the last chosen setting. Now for 99% of you out there, you generally buy your dvd’s in the same region as you bought your dvd player. This means all your dvds have to correct region code already, and none of this is going to help you. But for the rest of you who buy DVD’s abroad, or just like to be able to hack your equipment, then I have a little secret for you. Many, not all, but many DVD players have hidden access code to change the region setting. While searching around for way to encode my legally owned DVD’s to a format which is friendly to my PDA, I have stumbled upon the ‘DVD Player Hack List’ .
Please read the rest of this post before accessing the list. Here you will find, at the time of this writing, a list of 4204 different DVD players hacks to change the region code. You can either change the region code to that of the DVD you are trying to play, or best yet, change the region code on the DVD player to ‘0′, which is region free. Basically this means you can play any DVD regardless of the region code, and the only problems you might encounter is trying to play a NTSC disc on a PAL unit, or vice versa. I’ve searched out every DVD player in my house and changed everyone to region 0. Now for the warning.
Warning:
- Not every DVD player is listed, some of them don’t have hacks to change the region code.
- No, I don’t have any more information about hacking DVD players other than this site, so I cannot help you.
- Use at your own risk! These codes were generally meant for service peopel. You maybe able to do harm to your DVD player messing around with these. If you do screw your DVD player up, don’t come to me, I cannot help you, nor will I fix it or buy you a new one.
- Many times a DVD model will have many different hacks. And the hacks usually only require you to use your remote control to change the DVD settings. If a particular hack listing requires you to click on a link that leads to another website for ‘more information’, then its probably fake and will do you no good. Your best bet is not to follow any links in the listings.
- Finally, if you don’t need to do it, then don’t! This is basically for power users who know the risk.
I figured that this might help people out there, plus its pretty neat in my book. Its almost like software easter eggs. If you like easter eggs, and I’m not talking about those brightly colored avian embryos you get in the spring, but the hidden little messages and animations that programmers put in their software and stuff, then point your browser to Easter Egg Archive , which has thousands of different easter eggs for all sorts of things. If you found this information useful, do me a favor and leave me a comment, or send me an email at lynxsilver@gmail.com , and feel free to add yourself to our Frappr Map . Thanks for coming by! Technorati Tags: DVD , Player , Region , Code , Hack , Easter , Egg , Lynx , NTSC , PAL
