Though the main purpose of DVD recorders is to record video-data, they can also play commercial DVD discs, that fall under copyright protection. The DVD regions (or region encoding) apply only to the commercial DVDs and not to your home-made movies.
Even if you bought your DVD recorder, let's say, basically to be able to record your favorite TV shows, you probably want to also playback the pre-recorded DVDs you buy from the store. At this point, you have to pay atention to the DVD regions encoding problem.
There are seven DVD regions worldwide
- Region 1: United States and Canada
- Region 2: Europe, Japan, South Africa, Middle East countries
- Region 3: Southeast Asia and East Asia, including Hong Kong
- Region 4: Australia, New Zeeland, Pacific Islands, Central America, Mexico, South America, the Caribbean
- Region 5: Eastern Europe, Former Soviet Union Countries, India, Africa, North Coreea, Mongolia
- Region 6: China
- Region 7: Is reserved but not yet used
Both DVD recorders and pre-recorded DVDs have one of the seven region-codes encripted on them. You can also find commercial discs, or DVD units which are not encoded. Virtually, the code-free discs can playback on any DVD player, no matter the region-encoding. In the DVD recorders' world, you can find a multi-region DVD recorder at almost any manufacturer. In this case, “multi-region” defines its ability to support DVDs from all over the world. The multi-region feature is sometimes referred to as “Region 0” or “Region All”. See some examples of multi-region DVD recorders from: Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Sony and Toshiba.
If you wonder why we need region-encoding for DVDs, here is a potential reason: It is by now a fact that people can be very ingenious when it comes to breaking commercial laws, and copyright is among them. As movies are first released on the big screens and only afterwards they sell on DVD, there is a certain gap that ensures both theater box offices and home movie distribution to cash their money. The problem is, by the time a movie has been long-time available on DVD in America, it is newly arrived in Japanese theatres. In these conditions, and with the generalization of the world wide web, DVD encoding is just a copyright protection tool, to prevent unauthorized distribution of commercial videos throughout the world.