Will your DVDs play in my country?
Australian DVDs are formatted in PAL and encoded for Region 4 unless stated otherwise on our website.
You may notice that some discs have multiple zones ensuring playability in other countries, providing your DVD player and television are both PAL compatible.
What are the "regions"?
A security system introduced to DVD at the request of Hollywood's major studios to ensure that DVDs released and sold in one region will not play on DVD machines in other regions.
Movie distributors therefore maintain control over release dates of their films, as well as enabling discs to be produced that conform to different censorship laws, language and subtitle requirements.
When a DVD disc is manufactured, a region code is applied at the authoring stage such that the final disc will play only on those players distributed in the designated world region.
There are 6 regions throughout the world:
Region 1 - Canada, United States and its Territories
Region 2 - Japan, Europe, South Africa and the Middle East
Region 3 - Southeast Asia and East Asia
Region 4 - Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Central and South America
Region 5 - Indian Subcontinent, Former Soviet Union and Africa
Region 6 - China
Tee Vee Dvd will list all the regions a particular DVD is compatible with.
In the instance of a Region 0 or Region All title, the item page will list "1,2,3,4,5,6" as the region encoding.
Regional codes are optional for the makers of DVD discs themselves.
The encryption system on each disc is the same which leads to the next question.
My disc won't work!
Quite often the cause of this can be due to discs that have been handled incorrectly (ie. fingerprints or scratches on the read surface, discs forceably removed from their casing causing cracks).
It is most unusual for a disc to be faulty in any way when manufactured.
There are rare instances of faulty batches which usually result in product recalls.
Occasionally discs have been found to not be compatible with certain DVD players which is why we encourage our customers to firstly check any problem discs on another brand of player.
The Moral of the story here, is check your DVD player plays the dvd before you purchase any unit .
One hopes this will explain all about regions,it can be confusing sometimes,have a great day and great viewing.
Kind Regards
Bernard