You take it as gospel that when you travel to Europe your electric razor will not plug into the socket at your Parisian hotel. You probably also know that the video tape of your baby that you sent to Aunt Consuelo in Spain never played on her VCR. Yet did you know that the most recent release of the latest movie that you are sending to your friend Luigi in Italy will most likely not play on his DVD player? It may come as a bit of a rude awakening to some, but not all DVD players are created equal – more specifically, there are some subtle technical differences that will not permit some movies to be played in certain parts of the world.

It does not matter if you try to play the movie on a portable DVD player or on stationary DVD players attached to a big screen television set. It appears that the motion picture industry which oversees the release of movies for the general public has decided that in order to retain control over which markets would receive the rights to view a certain DVD, they encoded them with specific codes that denote the region where the DVD players will be able to play the movie. Obviously, this permits greater control over the copyrighted material and is in the best interest of the movie industry and the actors, but at the same time it infringes the rights of viewers to share their movies with friends.

Of course, where there are strong wills there are DVD players that will override the coding. A region free DVD player – sometimes referred to as a code free DVD player - refers to the technology that permits movie buffs to view movies from anywhere around the world, no matter what their coding may be.

You may be tempted to think that these DVD players must be not legit, or perhaps somebody’s idea of spending some free time with an old DVD player, a screw driver, and perhaps some free DVD player downloads, only to then turn around and sell it. You could not be further from the truth! While there may be some free DVD player software involved, DVD player reviews show that these gadgets have big names, such as Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba and others. So go ahead and get a zone free DVD player, download a movie from anywhere in the world, and then be free to watch it!