Playing Foreign DVDs

I’m going to oversimplify this to the common cases I expect to see here. Most of the visitors to this site are from either Australia (about half) or the US (about a quarter). More techie info here.\n\nYou may want to watch Ryan’s work produced in another country. Like: You’re in the UK and have a US Fairly Legal DVD. Or you’re in the US and want to watch All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane and have the Australian DVD.\n\n

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  1. DVDs that aren’t BluRay are encoded in PAL or NTSC. Australia and most of Europe are in PAL and US much of the Americas are in NTSC. (Yes, I know there’s SECAM too.)

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  2. Additionally, DVDs have sales regions encoded. US is 1, Australia is 4. DVDs that are playable worldwide are region 0.

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  3. If you are using the same PAL/NTSC encoding as the DVD you want to play, you can play it through a typical DVD player if it permits you playing the other region.

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  4. If you’re not, you can play it through most modern computer DVD drives with one caveat: you can only change the region five times. That said, DVD drives aren’t particularly expensive any more. When my husband and I got MacBook Airs, we bought external DVD drives for them. One of these is now set to Australia as its home region, and the other is set to the US.

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\n\nThe beauty of this approach is that it opens up so many more things to watch—so long as you can get the DVD.

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