Hey guys, I just wanted to know if it's possible and easy to play NTSC Region 1 DVDs from USA on a PC. Do drives sold in Europe differ to ones sold in USA? As far as I can see, the decoding is done on software side and the drives come with no region code set, so you can set them to whatever region you want up to 4 (?) times.

You could just use VLC. I have a laptop (from the States) that plays region 2 DVDs with VLC. Also a friend here had a problem playing my DVDs from home, but I told him to install VLC. He has yet to call me saying that he can't watch Flight of the Conchords.

Personal Computers don't give a damn about PAL and NTSC. They're running at they're own framerate to which the video is (rather lossy) converted to. I'm quite amazed how long the concept of "PAL" has lived in gaming consoles.

As for the region protection, either use DeCSS capable software (as already suggested), set the required region for the optical drive (may be set 5 times), or use a region free firmware (risky). The hardware drive also doesn't care about the coded MPEG-2 video, its frame size or rate.

There are hacked firmware updates for some drives like the NEC ones that make them region-free. Look at the CDFreaks forums for more details.

I use Media Player Classic. It plays DVDs out of the box (it is a single .exe file) and you don't need any other software. I think that it can be configured to ignore the region code of the DVD and play them (which is probably the default setting). This means that you may not have to mess around with the region code of your drive. However, I am not really sure about this. Try MPC and tell me if this is indeed true.

At least from what I can tell, VLC as a standalone doesn't check for region code without touching anything. Installing any sort of software will call up Windows and if you allow it to run something, you lose a "region code change" in the cd/dvd drives' hardware.