Region Coding
What is DVD region coding?
Imposed by the film studios due to the staggered theatrical release of movies worldwide and to protect exclusive markets, DVD region coding was designed as a method of ensuring DVD's would be playable only in certain areas of the world.
DVD region 1: The US, US territories, Canada
DVD region 2: Europe, Japan, Middle East, Egypt, South Africa, Greenland
DVD region 3: Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong
DVD region 4: Mexico, South America, Central America, Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Caribbean
DVD region 5: Russia (former USSR), Eastern Europe, India, most of Africa, North Korea, Mongolia
DVD region 6: China
What is Region 0?
Also known as 'Region Free', Region 0 DVD's are compatible with any DVD player as they are specifically enabled for ALL areas of the world. However, Region 0 DVD are sometimes encoded in NTSC rather than PAL, which will require a NTSC compatible TV in order to ensure colour playback.
What is NTSC/PAL?
There are two different methods for picture decoding standards: Europe (R2) uses the PAL system; North America (R1) uses the NTSC system.
What will I need to view NTSC discs?
In order for stable colour reproduction during playback, you'll require a NTSC compatible TV, often referred to as a 'multi-standard' or 'world' specification.
How are NTSC and PAL different?
Firstly, NTSC and PAL differ in the number of scan lines available in the vertical axis of the screen; NTSC has 480, PAL has 576. Secondly, there is a slight variation between NTSC and PAL running speeds. Where conventional film runs at 24 frames per second (fps), a TV signal runs at 30 fps (60 fields) for NTSC, or 25 fps (50 fields) for PAL. For a PAL display, the simple method when transferring film is to present the film frames at 25 a second instead of 24 (the 4% speedup as mentioned above) and speed up the image to be synchronous with the images. The speedup raises the pitch of available audio tracks by one half of one tone although it's debatable as to whether this is distinguishable by the human ear. The solution for a NTSC display is to spread the 24 film frames across the 60 video fields by alternating the display of the first film frame for 2 video fields and the next film frame for 3 video fields. This process is referred to as 2-3 pulldown and, again, it's questionable whether this process is noticeable to the human eye. Neither format is inherently better than the other.