Does regional encoding effect DVD drives? i.e. will I still need to buy only Region 1 movies? I did a search and found a thread about a drive "locking" in the region. Is this right or will a drive play any region?
Any drive that was made after 2000 or so is RPC2 - that is, it is set to some region and you can only change that region several times before the drive locks the region setting.
But worry not - many DVD drives have 3rd party firmware which removes the region protection (making the drive RPC1, or regionless). However, you might also have to make your software regionless as well, since some, like PowerDVD, will fall back on software region protection if the hardware doesn't have it.
There are also some software packages that allow you to play DVDs from other regions without you having to flash to an RPC1 firmware.
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