Imagine your frustration: you've bought a wonderful DVD in Europe and brought it back to the States. You stick it into your DVD player and tell your family "watch this!". For your efforts, your DVD player either scolds you about being in the wrong region or your television looks scrambled beyond all recognition.

HUH?

There are a two major things that will ensure a foreign DVD will fail in your player:

1. Region Coding
2. Television Standards

Likewise, when creating a DVD, consider the possibility of foreign or multinational distribution. These same two items should be recognized as possible problem areas.

Region Coding serves to restrict the ability to play a DVD to a geographical area in the world. Both DVD-Video players and computers' DVD drives are affected by region coding. There's no problem if you purchase equipment and DVDs from the same region. All of the United States and Canada are "Region 1" and movies will play across the borders of those two countries. The problem arises when you try to play a movie intended for Australia in a player purchased in England. They are different regions and both are different from the U.S. and Canada.

The regional map above (which links to a larger version) shows the approximate boundaries of DVD regions numbered from 1 through 8 (one region is yet to be assigned). There is also a written list of countries within the DVD Region map available at the bottom of this page. It is possible to create a DVD that has no region coding, called "Region 0" (zero). This type of disk will not trigger the region protection on DVD players.

To be clear, a DVD movie doesn't have a GPS homing device that disables it or calls the authorities when you take it to the wrong country (although the movie industry would certainly love that). You can easily carry a DVD movie and player from region to region. The DVD will still play as long as the DVD and player region coding matches. DVD-Video products from movie studios are sold with regional restrictions matching players sold into those areas by manufacturers. The thought is that local populations will buy equipment and DVDs from the same region and everything will work fine.

Why do they do that? It depends on who you ask. Since the movie studios asked for the technology (demanded it, actually) their reasons are really the only relevant ones. Movie studios may wish to (or be forced to) make a movie available in different parts of the world at different times. The region coding on DVDs will prevent the average user from playing a DVD in a region where the film has not been released.

Movie studios must also control the content seen by different regions within the same movie. A scene that would be humorous in one region could spark a civil war in another, so the movie studios adjust the movie with alternate dialog or images to work around cultural or political issues. You would be amazed at how much work goes into getting a movie past the censorship board of several hundred countries in dozens of languages. The movie studios may need to re-shoot or re-edit whole sections before it can be released in certain areas of the world, which accounts for some of the delays in international releases. Region coding helps keep the correct versions of these movies within the proper borders.

Then, there are the mass market speculators that are looking for covert reasons for region coding. Some claim to have found a pattern of price fixing by using DVD regions. Others claim censorship plays a role. Whatever the case, the movie studios are firmly in control of their distribution channels, including DVD. With the continuing "box office slump", DVD releases are becoming more important to studios needing to generate revenue. You can bet your socks they will defend whatever controls/restrictions they can use to maximize the return on investment.

Region Free Players have surfaced as a huge market in Asia and the Middle East to circumvent regional controls. It doesn't matter what the DVD region coding is on the disk, the player ignores it and plays anyway. Computers with DVD drives have the ability to adjust the region coding on the drive a certain number of times (usually five) with a software utility. It's up to the DVD drive's manufacturer to provide a utility to alter the drive's region coding and the adjustment limit prevents region hopping by users - unless you find the utility that lets you reset your DVD drive as often as you wish. Clearly, all these things are not on the wish list of movie studios.

To answer the perceived threat of circumvented regional coding, the movie studios have been releasing DVDs containing RCE (Regional Coding Enhancement), sometimes called REA. This type of control prevents DVDs from playing on equipment without active regional control. So, we have a opened new venue for electronic warfare between copyright holders and those seeking to circumvent any restriction presented to them.

Television Standards plays another role in the success of playing DVD-Video. On top of the region coding, DVDs are manufactured and distributed with television standards conforming with local television broadcasts, either PAL and all its variations or NTSC.

More properly, a standard DVD-Video title has either 525 television lines or 625 television lines at either 25 or 30 frames per second. The players themselves usually don't have a composite output mimicking a broadcast television station, but if it did, it would likely be built to match the most common television broadcast standard in the area it was sold. There is no DVD standard for NTSC, PAL or SECAM but the player itself may output one of them for connection to an ordinary television.

Computers don't care about television standards at all, only region coding on commercial DVDs. Only hardware DVD players and televisions get fussy about television standards.

Television standards are out of the hands of movie studios and DVD manufacturers, and has more to do with color television standards as they were regionally adopted between the 1950s and 1960s. DVD player manufacturers must create a half-dozen variants of the same player just so they work everywhere in the world. Even if you can get a DVD player to recognize a disk, the television connected to the player must be able to understand its output and properly display PAL, SECAM or NTSC video.

The worst of these areas is probably the Middle East. Within a 500 mile radius, you'll find every television standard, every television broadcast  frequency range, every household power system and every cultural sensitivity left behind by empires, political and religious alignments. This creates a problem for the inhabitants who may drive an hour an any direction and cross several boundaries of technical norms. As a result, it is not uncommon for consumer televisions and video players sold in these regions to work with any power source and play all world television standards. I mean ALL world television standards. Even Europe suffers from a little of this standards nonsense and the result is a regionally fragmented television standards experience that producers should be aware of.

Some of the newer flat panel display (LCD, DLP or Plasma) devices are really computer monitors that can sync to any display standard, including television broadcast standards. These newer systems will make it easier in the long run to remove television standards as an obstacle to distribution.

If you are creating a DVD for distribution somewhere other than the United States, we will ask you to stick a pin in a map so that we can make a successful DVD for that region. We have the ability to create any DVD standard from any source material. Your sales and marketing presentation, feature film or broadcast program intended for the U.S. can be reworked for distribution anywhere else in the world.

Please don't ask us to convert foreign assets to something you can view locally as that would be a violation of copyright laws, something we're not interested in stepping in. Technically, it's possible to do but we can legally only do it if you can obtain written authorization and release from the copyright holder to create a converted copy. The alternative is to purchase the equipment that can also play the DVD. If you intend to purchase equipment overseas, carefully check on import restrictions for the equipment you'll be bringing. Don't fully believe the salesman where you are buying the equipment that "it's OK" to import to the U.S. or anywhere else. You may encounter high import duties or other restrictions. Alternately, there are places in the U.S. that will sell you multiformat, region free DVD and video equipment - just look for them on the Internet.

Data Encryption isn't a regional issue, but it's another thing that may ensure your failure in trying to get a foreign DVD to play somewhere it shouldn't. Movie studios were completely paranoid of these new-fangled DVD things when the technology surfaced. Imagine, perfect digital copies of movies being distributed throughout the world without duplication restraint or payment tracking. Consumer's mouths watered and DVD player manufacturers found themselves staring down the barrel of a lawyer's pen. The studios would not permit or support the DVD format unless some protections were put in place. Manufacturers adopted several content protection schemes that movie studios eventually accepted. This is the basis of the uneasy truce forged between studios and manufacturers.

Data encryption on DVDs prevent the average person from simply copying a movie and distributing it to friends, or worse, selling thousands of copies on the street for fun and profit. The encryption on DVDs is called "CSS" for Content Scrambling System and was cracked shortly after the introduction of DVD movies.

It's unfortunate that movie studios are viewed as assuming everyone is a pirate, outraging the average person with their defenses. Studios deploy draconian protection schemes and herds of lawyers against seemingly innocent DVD owners. The fact is that once you purchase a DVD, all you've bought is the plastic. The recording on the plastic is actually owned by someone else and you have a perpetual license to use the material as long as you don't violate the license terms. If there were no restrictions or difficulties to copy these movies, you can bet your stars that everyone would be doing it. We call it "sharing". The studios call it "theft". The studios are right.

Macrovision is a term that may sound familiar. It prevented consumers from copying movies between analog home video recorders. The idea is to destroy a portion of the video signal enough to upset an analog video recorder but allow a television receiver to function properly. It usually works. DVD-Video titles from movie studios generally contain Macrovision to prevent copying a DVD to a VHS tape for "sharing".

Henninger Media Services can author and duplicate your DVD titles with any of these restrictions either absent or present. If you want a region free DVD-Video title, that's no problem. If you want CSS encryption and/or Macrovision, that can also be done. During the creation process, all of these items are optional. Please allow us to bid on your International DVD needs.

Steve Wiedemann is Sr. VP, Director of Technology for Henninger Media Services.