Region FAQ

What are regions?
DVD and Blu-ray regions are codes for specifications that require a media player to be "hard-coded" to accept the disc's particular region. For example a region 1 disc cannot play in a region 3 DVD player.

What regions apply to which area?
For DVDs there are eight designated regions in total, six of which are dedicated for world regions.

Region 1 - United States and Canada
Region 2 - Japan, Europe, Middle East and South Africa
Region 3 - Hong Kong, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Borneo and Indonesia
Region 4 - Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, South America and the Caribbean
Region 5 - Russia, North Korea, India, Africa, Mongolia and former USSR countries
Region 6 - China
Region 7 - For private use
Region 8 - For commercial use

In addition to these, there is also an undefined "region 9" as well. This was planned for future use, but some players use it as a way to get around region locks.

For Blu-rays the number of regions is dramatically less. In fact, there are just three:

Region A - North America, South America, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia
Region B - Africa, Middle East, Western Asia, most of Europe, Ukraine and Oceania
Region C - Central Asia, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Mongolia, South Asia, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan and Moldova

What is region 0?
Region 0, or region free as they are sometimes called, are DVDs with no region. They are meant to play on all DVD players. These discs are sometimes illegal, coming from firms who have not licensed the material, however that is not always the case.

For Blu-rays, this is instead called Region ABC.

What is the purpose of different regions?
Most films are released theatrically in the United States first. Around three to six months later, those same movies are released in Japan, Europe and other nations It is then around five through ten months after the initial release that the film will come out on DVD in the States. Unfortunately, this DVD release conflicts with the theatrical showing of the film in other nations of the world. So, in order to stop people from importing the movie, instead of seeing it in the theaters, different regions were created. Furthermore, regions also allow companies to charge different prices for the discs depending on location, usually commanding a premium in the US and Japan while the products will sell for much less in most other nations.

Is there a way around different regions?
There are several companies that sell region free, sometimes called code free, DVD players.

There was once a time that the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA) created a technology called Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE) in response to this. It was included on most region 1 titles. This technology allows the DVD to check the region of your player and if it detects a setting of 0 (region free) it will not play correctly. Newer region free players, though, change their setting depending on what region the disc is, instead of using 0, so this should only be a problem on older hardware units. Because this technology wrongly locked out legitamte region 1 players, though, it was abandoned. Here is a list of all the known RCE titles, none of which are Toho related.

If you have a DVD-R drive on your computer than you can use a DVD decoder, which will allow the drive to work much in the same way that modern region free players do.

It should be noted that all DVD players sold in Australia and New Zealand are set to region 0, after their courts deemed that region encoding was in violation of the Trade Practices Act.