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Regional Coding The movie industry often releases theatrical films and home videos on different areas of the world. This may be with the aim of holding the video in a local market until after a film's theatrical release, or to allow time for the feature to be re-edited or dubbed into a new language for the target country. To ensure that entertainment companies have control over the international distribution and timing of their releases, DVD specification divides the world into six regions. DVD Production Each DVD is hardware-coded for a single region. At the discretion of the distributor any given DVD-Video title may be coded during authoring to allow playback in one or more regions. For a regionally-coded DVD disc to play back, the regions of the title and the player must match. For example, DVD titles encoded as Region 2 for Japan will not play back in US players, which will only play discs encoded for Region 1. Titles may optionally be enabled for all regions. |
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There
are 8 regions (also called 'locales'). Players and discs are identified
by the region number superimposed on a world globe. If a disc plays
in more than one region it will have more than one number on the
globe. |
