Have you ever tried to watch a DVD from another country, either on your DVD Player or your computer, and had that horrible message flash at you saying "Wrong Region Code"?

This is because of the security system applied to the DVD at the time of production, known as Region Coding. It has been introduced to the DVD at the request of Hollywood's major studios to ensure that DVDs released and sold in one region will not play on DVD machines in other regions.

By applying Region Coding to DVDs the movie distributors maintain control over release dates of their films, as well as enabling discs to be produced that conform to different censorship laws, language and subtitle requirements.

When a DVD disc is manufactured, a region code is applied at the authoring stage such that the final disc will play only on those players distributed in the designated world region.

However, in the current global environment when it is just so easy to purchase a DVD from another country, Region Coding is a nuisance. In fact, in Australia, it is believed that the Australia Consumer and Competition Commission (the Federal Government agency responsible for ensuring "Fair Trade") has ruled that Region Coding is restrictive trade practices and required that DVD Players be "multi region".

The world has been divided into 6 Regions for coding purposes:

Region 1 - Canada, United States and its Territories

Region 2 - Japan, Europe, South Africa and the Middle East

Region 3 - Southeast Asia and East Asia

Region 4 - Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Central and South America

Region 5 - Indian Subcontinent, Former Soviet Union and Africa

Region 6 - China

Additionally, DVDs may be encoded as Region 0 or Region All, which means that they are compatible in all regions.

Traditionally, DVD players are also programmed with a Region Code. To be able to play a DVD, the region codes of both the DVD Player and DVD must be the same.

As outlined above, with the ability to "buy online", region coding has become a major issue. It is incredibly easy for someone in Australia to purchase a DVD from the USA (and vice versa). If the DVD player is not "multi zoned" or "multi region", then there will be problems.

So how do you remedy "Region Coded" DVD players? These days, nearly all mainstream DVD players (including those in computers) have codes that may be entered via the Remote Control. These codes "reprogram" the Player to allow it to read DVDs in other zones.

The thing is to find out what the code is to reprogram the player. You can use software to help you do this. For example, DVD UNLOCKER is a program that has 1500+ codes for mainstream DVD players, so that reprogramming may be achieved quickly and easily.

This means you can bypass the Region Coding on your DVD Player now and play DVDs for all around the world without a problem.