Hardware Installaiton English
DVD Region Coding
Region Playback Control Management
All DVD Video Playback systems have “Region Playback Control” management
(PRC) which is required by Hollywood movie industry and defined by DVD Forum.
This includes DVD-Video players and PC systems with DVD-Video capability. You
can only play DVD-Video discs with the same region codes as your DVD-Video
Playback system.
As for DVD-ROM drives, one kind of the DVD-Video Playback system, there are 2
types:
RPC Phase 1 (as RPC1):
RPC1 drives do not have built-in hardware support for region management.
DVD-ROM drives of this kind don’t play a part in controlling the playback region. It
solely depends on the decoder.
RPC Phase 2 (as RPC2):
RPC2 drives maintain the region change count information in hardware, and in
general, the region of such drives can be changed up to 5 times by the end users
under some software decoder (e.g. PowerDVD)
And referring to the region codes, there are 6 regions worldwide, and normally, there
is a region code mark on the package of DVD titles.
Region 1: Canada, US
Region 2: Japan, Europe, South Africa, and Middle East (including Egypt)
Region 3: Southeast Asia and East Asia (including Hong Kong)
Region 4: Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Central America, Mexico, South
America, and the Caribbean
Region 5: Eastern Europe, Indian subcontinent, Africa, North Korea, and Mongolia
Region 6: China
About This 16X DVD Dual Drive
This 16x DVD Dual drive is a RPC2 drive and according to DVD-Forum, PC chip
must be designed into DVD-ROM drives to record how many times a user has
changed the region code. Once the limit of 5 changes is reached, the drive won’t
allow you to change the region code anymore. It means the code will be locked and
only those DVD titles of the same region code could be played afterwards, so set the
code carefully.
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