Anyone who has a DVD collection is probably familiar with the concept of DVD Region Codes. Most commercially released DVDs have been assigned a region code which prevents a DVD released in one part of the world, from being played in another. There are a number of reasons behind this, mostly relating to motion picture studios controlling release and distribution of DVDs internationally. Of particular interest is the provision for pricing discrimination, which essentially means that a greater amount can be charged for those customers who are willing to pay more. Generally, more can be charged to those countries with a higher cost of living.

This has been raised as a possible violation of World Trade Organisation Free Trade agreements, and some countries including my own, Australia, consider selling DVD players that are region-specifc could be in violation of local Trade Practises laws.

But this article isn't about fairness or legal principles. I, and many other Australians, have very real issues with regioning from the point of view that we are limited to seeing those movies released within Region 4. Australia shares a region code with Oceania,Central and South America,the Caribbean and Mexico. As you can probably guesss, this means enormous range of international and independant movies will never make it to Australia, since it isn't considered commercially viable.

As someone who loves watching a broad spectrum of movies, of dfiferent cultures, languages, cultures, both mainstream and independant, I have had to go online to buy many of my DVDs from overseas, My collection spans 6 different region codes.

I'm lucky in that multizone DVD players are easily available within Australia and I have one. However, this doesn't apply to most DVD players within computers. If I want to play a legitimate DVD I purchased throuh Amazon UK, I would get a message similar to the below:

So how can I deal with this? With a little program called DVD43. DVD43 when running on your computer, will decrypt any DVD on the fly. It doesn't affect or change the DVD itsel, but it does allow users to bypass the region encoding to read any DVD for playback. It is freeware and compatible with Windows 2000, XP and Vista. It's simple to install and there is no special configuration required.

Check it out at http://www.dvd43.com