Q: I want to play Japanese and American DVDs on my Toshiba SD-M1212. I was wondering if there was a program that would let me change the region code or disable it.

-- email from Cain Bivins

A: DVD comes in two incarnations. The first is the DVD player that hooks up to your TV for watching movies and listening to music. The second is a DVD drive (DVD-ROM) that hooks up to your computer to run software, as well as play movies and music. Variations of each type can be modified to play discs regardless of their regional codes.

Computer-playback systems check for regional codes before playing movies from a DVD-Video. Newer "RPC2" DVD-ROM drives let you change the region code up to five times. Once a drive has reached the limit it can't be changed again unless the vendor or manufacturer resets it.

REALmagic Hollywood Plus is a software and interface board for your DVD-ROM that allows you to designate your region code. It even recommends purchasing more than one board to swap between regions. More information and software for circumventing DVD-ROM region restrictions is available from Internet sites such as Visual Domain.

Region codes exist on DVD discs and in players because motion-picture studios want to control the home release of movies in different countries. A movie may come out on video in the United States when it's just hitting screens in Europe.

Also, studios sell distribution rights to different foreign distributors and would like to guarantee an exclusive market. They therefore have required that the DVD standard include codes that can be used to prevent playback of certain discs in certain geographical regions.

Each player is given a code for the region in which it's sold. The player will refuse to play discs that are not allowed in that region. This means that discs bought in one country may not play on players bought in another country.

Some discs contain program code that checks for the proper region. These "smart discs" won't play on code-free players that have their region set to 0, but they can be played on code-switchable players that allow you to change the region using the remote control.

They may also not work on "auto-switching" players that recognize and match the disc region. Information about modifying players can be found on the Internet at sites such as Code Free DVD, PlanetDVD, and in the rec.video.dvd newsgroups.

Following is a list of region codes and their corresponding geography.

  1. Canada, United States, US. Territories
  2. Japan, Europe, South Africa, Middle East (including Egypt)
  3. Southeast Asia, East Asia (including Hong Kong)
  4. Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Central America, Mexico, South America, Caribbean
  5. Former Soviet Union, Indian Subcontinent, Africa (also North Korea, Mongolia)
  6. China
  7. Reserved
  8. Special international venues (airplanes, cruise ships, and so on)