Cheat DVD Regional Encoding

If you’ve ever bought a DVD that wouldn’t play on your DVD player due to region incompatibilities (the film industry’s attempt at protecting their distribution system), Wired’s guide to cheat DVD regional encoding is for you. The cheapest solution:

If you live in the U.S. or if you simply want a solution that will work on any DVD player—even those which haven’t been hacked—your best solution is to burn a copy of the movie.

…what you’ll want to do is rip a copy of your DVD using one of the many popular ripping programs on the market (we suggest ImgBurn on Windows and Mac The Ripper for Mac). Make sure that you set the ripping software to produce a “region all” file and then, when you’ve got a copy on your hard drive, burn a new DVD.

Wired suggests a couple of shareware apps to burn the new regionless DVDs, but you should also be able to use free/freeware apps like ImgBurn or CDBurnerXP for Windows and Burn for Macs.