How Does DVD Piracy Protection Work on PC DVD Drives?

It is common knowledge that DVDs are protected by region codes. This means that you won't be able to watch a DVD on another device with a different region code. To put it simply, you cannot play a region 1 disc on a region 3 player even if you have an original and authentic copy of a DVD movie. Well, even though it's been in effect for so many years, it still sounds absurd not being able to watch a movie especially when you travel to a different region or if you bought a hard-to-find movie from another place. This is so true about DVD players, unless you have an all-region DVD player.

Now, a lot of us watch DVD movies on our PCs. You might have good software, a decent monitor and a powerful video card that can greatly improve the quality of your movies. However, as with DVD players, PC DVD drives also have region protection.

In my experience, you are only allowed a set number of times to change the region code of the DVDs your drive can play. For example, if you have a region 1 and a region 3 disc, you can only change it let's say 3 times. After that, you won't be able to change the disc and moving forward it will only play discs meant for your region. The number of times you can change the regional settings may differ depending on the brand or model of your DVD drive.

There are also lots of software DVD video players that you can use. They will be able to play your discs but the same rules apply. You can only change the regional settings a set number of times then the player won't be able to play a disc that is not in the same region your DVD drive is set on.

It is possible that you might be thinking of a workaround for this. I've actually tried several players, paid and free, but the discs won't just play. You can use different DVD drives but that would be extremely costly and impractical. Well, another sure way is to buy a DVD with the same region as your drive and that's probably the best for now.

I have quite a lot of region 1 discs that were sent to me and some that I bought myself. However, here in the Philippines, we are set to play region 3 discs. Well, in my opinion, it really doesn't seem fair to set regions. You have an original disc anyway and to buy another disc in another region just to be able to play it if you're in another region is quite unreasonable.

Well, I do understand that this is really to prevent piracy and basically for the protection of the producers and those that made the movies possible. They are due for the efforts their made and that's a fact. But still if you have an original copy of a video, then you should at least be able to play them. The only problem is that pirated discs are usually set to all-region and thus, you can watch it on almost any DVD player regardless of its regional setting.

Source:
Wikipedia - DVD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD