You Could Certainly Buy an All Region Blu Ray Player; or You Could Try Your Options

You get to see these DVD frustrations all over the Internet. Standard DVDs are coded to about a half-dozen different world regions. They only play on DVD players built for those regions. Things are slightly different with Blu-ray discs. These are not coded to that many regions. There are just three regions – A, B and C. Still, if you're in the US and you wish to watch a Blu-ray disc from Britain, you're out of luck. The US is region A, and Europe is region B. You could just get an all region Blu-ray player and just get on with life though, right?

The movie studios do have their reasons why they wish to complicate things in this way. To begin with,  selling incompatible discs in different regions makes it easy for them to price their products differently in different parts of the world. And then, they don't want discs from one part of the world to just ruin the theatrical profits in another part of the world where a movie they still be in theaters.

Okay, that's all well and fine you're saying; how exactly do you get an all region Blu-ray player? It's a question that many very resourceful people have been asking for a while now, and the most popular hacks are partially successful. They work on some players and not on others. One popular way is to simply use ripper software. You take your Blu-ray disc and rip it to another format such as .MKV or .AVI. Once you have your discs converted to one of these region-agnostic formats, you can enjoy them on any kind of player or TV equipped with USB port.

There is no loss of quality, certainly. There's another problem that you need to contend with though – disk space. Blu-ray rips are huge. It isn't uncommon for a movie to take up 40 GB of space. If you have a capacious 1 TB hard drive, you will only be able to fit about 25 of these movies in there. Is there a more convenient option?

Well, you certainly could buy an all region Blu-ray player for less than $100. Pioneer, for instance, sells a model for $85. Of course, that's a good chunk of money. If you'd rather not spend your money to bring home yet another black box, you could simply consider buying blank Blu-ray discs and then making region free copies of the discs you have already. All you need is a Blu-ray copy application. And there are plenty of those.