In the first generation of DVD-Rom drives the region concept was not yet established.

The big movie companies who so far divided the world by the various T.V. standards (NTSC, Pal, etc...) started to fear the DVD. Since the DVD format is a digital medium and thus has no different broadcast standards for various world regions. In order to discourage cross-country purchases of movie titles, the studios came out with the infamous Region Scheme. This scheme basically divided our small planet into six regions.


However, not all regions were created equal.

Since 99.99% of the world film market is generated in the good U.S. of A (which is region #1 if someone is wondering), nearly all the DVD titles come out as Region #1 and only then transferred to the various other regions. However, not all titles are transferred, while others are modified and lose some of the perks that the original Region #1 title had.


At the writing of this article, the DVD-Rom drives are at their third Generation.

The first DVD generation was buggy, unreliable, unsupported and undesired. The second DVD generation was faster, more reliable, greatly supported, but lacked features (It didn't read certain types of CD medias).

The third DVD generation seems to have it all, it's even faster, more reliable, supports all the current media types. But alas, nothing is perfect, along with this improved generation, certain companies *cough*Creative*cough* started implementing the DVD Region Code directly into the Drive Hardware (firmware).

This abonomy will prevent you from playing DVD Titles from every region even if your decoder card or decoder software support multi-regions.

To help you on your quest for a working DVD-Rom drive, i will list any drive that is region-free or has some region-workaround that allows it to play any region. However, you don't really expect me to buy and test each and every drive, so please send me information by eMail with your drive model and manufacturer name (example: Hitachi GD-2500) with a note saying if you can play multi-regions with your drive. Or, if you can't *cough*Creative Encore 5x*cough*. The following are three lists, in green are drives that are known to be multi-region. In yellow are the drives that are suspected of being multi-region. And in blue are drives that are known to be region-coded (single region).

The information in this list is user-submitted. I have no way to verify that each of these drives actually works. Use this list only as a reference tool.

All drives unless differently specified, are IDE drives.

Certain Region Locked drives can be patched to be made Region Free using a special Firmware program. For more information on this, visit the Firmware information page.