Here are the answers.

To start with, for the purpose of DVD manufacture and distribution, the world has been broken up into 6 zones. Why? Well, the distribution rights to movies are very complicated. The film studios raise money to make movies by selling these rights. So, to protect the cash-flush distributors, the "zone" system came into play.

Through the eyes of a DVD distributor, the world looks like this: South Africa is part of Zone 2 (the orange bits on the map above), a zone we share with the UK, Western Europe, the Middle East, Egypt and Japan.

The United States and Canada (the green bits) are Zone 1. The other zones, while delineated, have yet to see any movie releases. If you look on the back cover or on the spine of most DVDs, you'll find the zone symbol. It's a small, elliptical graphic of the globe with a number in it - like the one below. This symbol means that the DVD has been coded to play only on players that support Zone 2 encoded discs.

Some titles, usually music and documentary (though some movies as well) are encoded to play on multiple zones.

What this means in essence is that there is a North American version (Zone 1) and another version for the rest of the world.

There are three ways to strip away the zone protection on your machine - which is useful if you receive discs from friends overseas or you import titles unavailable in Zone 2 (which you are allowed to do if its for personal use). Two of the ways have severe short-comings. The first is you take your machine to your friendly neighbourhood electronics whiz who will muck about inside, solder a few things, poke around with your chips and disable the Zone checker - rendering your machine "zone-free". This is not without its drawbacks. Firstly, you're liable to loose your player's warranty. Secondly, it may all have been for nothing, since some DVDs are now being be manufactured to check for a specific zone. If they don't find one, they won't play. The second way is to buy a machine that is already "zone-free" (sometimes called "Region 0"). While this means you won't have to have some backyard electronics engineer poking around inside your player, you'll still have trouble with those disks that check for a specific zone. The third way - and this is quite popular - is to have a player that is "auto zone changing". However (and you saw this coming), those pesky DVD software engineers are working on code to fool your player into changing zones every few minutes. This will effectively ruin the joy of watching the movie. However, the forth way (for now) is fool proof. Some players have a secret remote control function to manually change zones. Because the machine is effectively a zone 2 player for the duration of a zone 2 movie, it's unlikely that there will be any clever DVD software written to block this.

Some DVDs are actually made as "Zone 0". Note that this is different to a DVD player being zone 0. These discs themselves are zone free or all zones.

While there are a few commercial movies on this zone, it's mainly alternative art-house and documentaries that land up being released on zone 0 or all zones. This is because they are often not tied in with big-business distribution deals that are part of the rationale behind the zone system in the first place.

There are also plans for Zone 7 and 8. Zone 7 is still reserved for something unspecified at the moment, but Zone 8 will apparently be used on aeroplanes and ships and other non-landlocked venues.

However, there is more to just zone-compatibility to worry about even if you have a multi-zone player. In addition to the zone-coding, discs will have a video format - either PAL or NTSC - which your player and your TV will have to support as well. Most North American discs use the NTSC format whereas discs of British or European origin use PAL. Luckily, this is something you probably don't have to worry about. Since the Americans believe that America is pretty much the whole world, their players only support NTSC, but the rest of us have been used to importing American software (and culture) for long enough to have made sure that most of our players support both formats. Still, its better to check that yours does before trying to play an NTSC encoded DVD or Videotape.

But wait, there's more! DVD titles are also tied in to different distribution deals within a particular zone. Even though the UK and South Africa fall into the same zone, companies have only the local distribution rights. What this means is that retailers can only stock Zone 2 DVDs.

by dvd universe (south africa)