I bought my Playstation 2 in the United States and I was wondering what DVD regions does it support when it's bought in the United States? Is it all of them or just region 1 like most DVD players bought in the United States?
I bought my Playstation 2 in the United States and I was wondering what DVD regions does it support when it's bought in the United States? Is it all of them or just region 1 like most DVD players bought in the United States?
The Playstation 2 sold here in America will not play games made for other counties unless you hack or mod the system, along with a few other devices that we won't get into here. Regional lockout is the programming practice, code, chip, or physical barrier used to prevent the playing of media designed for a device from the country where it is marketed on the version of the same device marketed in another country. In the video game industry, Nintendo was the originator of regional lockout for video games. Regional lockout in video games is when a piece of hardware is designed such that only software for that region is compatible. Most video games have region encoding.
The main regions are:
Regional lockout usually requires hardware manufactured by someone who can be trusted to support the methods chosen. For example, manufacturers need a license to produce DVD players, and games consoles are generally produced by only one company per console. The hardware is typically instructed to play only media designated as for a particular region, and that region is then encoded onto the media. For instance, a Japanese GameCube game disc is encoded with a marking NTSC-J (NTSC Japan), and GameCube consoles from Japan are programmed to only play games with that marking, not PAL or NTSC-M (NTSC US/Canada) game discs. In addition to technical measures, regional lockout schemes are generally supported by legal measures. For example, the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has a clause that covers "circumventing a scheme used to restrict access to copyrighted material" that may be used to prosecute people who ignore, circumvent, or crack a regional lockout scheme. Often such regional restrictions are in conflict with national law, for instance in pioneering regions such as Hong Kong, where parallel import is expressly allowed and supported by government bodies. To see what the full explaination on the DMCA, go HERE