Because They're Burning Bricks

There aren’t any. Region encoding is part of the CD-ROM firmware.

You need to hack the hardware to bypass it.

Ok, so there is software for sale that says it allows you to play DVDs from any region. and also some other something that says it can make your computer play whatever DVDs. . . and also there was a guy at the site I’m no longer going to (which is why this is now a problem)that had something that would allow my computer to act region free, and which he had on his computer. So are those not actually software and I just don’t get how they work, or what?

Yeah, it’s a bit more complicated than I first said, but you end up in the same place…

There’s a bunch of software out there that claims to “unlock your dvd player”. Most of it is a scam.

The region encoding of your DVD player is burned into a FlashROM chip inside your DVD player.

Your player IS capable of having its encoding changed up to five times.

Most of the software out there that makes claims about unlocking your player, will simply allow you to change this setting to a different region. They don’t actually remove the region checking, or somehow set it to a “no region” setting (because it doesn’t exist).

They simply use up one of these five region encoding modifications that your player already has.

The big gotcha that not all of them mention is that once you’ve altered your DVD player’s region encoding for that fifth time… it’s set permanently to that region and can’t be modified again without replacing the FlashROM inside the player.

ok, so then if I play an american dvd and then a uk dvd and then an american dvd and then an asian dvd and then an american dvd, I’m done? And I can’t watch anything but american dvds after that? Are the ripped off cheap dvds then not encoded to a specific region or something? I know that other volunteers buy the cheap dvds at the market and play them on something. . . computer, portable dvd player or whatever–how does that work?

Thanks, btw.

Do you know anything about http://www.region-free-dvd.com/ or http://www.dvdidle.com/dvd-region-free.htm or anything else like that?

Yep, that’s basically it.

And yes, many of the bootleg DVDs sold in Asia and probably Africa are simply are encoded as region 0, which is all regions. So, this allows any player to play them.

For more information about this stuff, check out these sites:

Wikipedia’s general info on region codes
How to flash the firmware on your DVD-Rom to make it region-free. This is dangerous and DOES run the risk of turning your DVD-ROM into a moderately expensive paper-weight.
Regional Coding Enhancement is the movie studios trying to block play of their movies on region-free players.
DVD FAQ is a whole ton of info about the DVD format. Probably more than you ever really wanted to know, but it may have some details that are helpful.

Yeah, I’ve seen them. They make a lot of interesting claims, but don’t really offer any screenshots or other evidence to show their product actually works as advertised.

Before you decide to buy any of these, I recommend looking around to see if you can find reports of anybody being successful with the software.

I will admit that there is a limit to my knowledge in this area, and they could be telling the whole truth. Their product certainly could work exactly as they say. There’s many highly technical details to this subject that I’m not familiar with.

I also suggest that, if you’re going to try their software out, try to use a cheap, replaceable DVD-Rom and a computer that doesn’t have any critical data on it. That way, if something goes wrong and their software turns your DVD-Rom into a brick or eats your data, you can easily replace both.