DVD Player Regions

« Previous Guide.
Next Guide. »
DVD Player will support just about any DVD you purchase, given the appropriate region restrictions.  DVD producers use region encoding to restrict where a DVD can be played by storing information on the DVD disc.
For example, a DVD may be restricted to Asia and hence can't be played on DVD devices in North America.  Some DVD discs don't have a region restriction and can be played on any device around the world.

Region limitation

The Mac OS X DVD Player is limited to playing discs for only one particular region and is most often restricted to where your Mac was purchased.  This is because yourMac DVD drive is automatically tied to a specific region code based on the first DVD that is used in it.  Note however that DVD Player is capable of playing discs from any region and the change entails a process called a switch, this entails changing the "Drive Setting".  You can change the region up to four times after which it is locked to the fifth region.  The region setting for the DVD player is stored in the Combo Drive or SuperDrive drive firmware.

If you like to make home movies, DVD Player will play the DVDs you create with Apple's iDVD and DVD Studio Pro applications.

Updates

  • May 1, 2009 - content revision
Created: 8:45 PM on Mar 17, 2007
By: switchtoamac