Region Locking, a way to prevent a disc from playing on another player from a different geographical region.

Ever since region locking has become controversial, there have been ways to defeat it such as hacking players with mod chips, using custom firmware, modifying the ripped BDMV files and burning them into BD-Rs, playing BDs on PC, or buying an expensive region-free player.

Unlike DVD's region locking, BD's region lock scheme is less restrictive by only dividing into three regions: 

• Region A: The Americas, Japan, and South East Asia 
• Region B: Europe, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the Middle East 
  
• Region: C: Russia and most of the Former Soviet Republics, Central Asia, Mainland China, Mongolia, and the Indian subcontinent. 
• Region Free or Region: ABC, will play on all players worldwide.

Regions for the Blu-ray Disc standard:       Region A/1       Region B/2       Region C/3

Movie distributors have different region coding policies, among major U.S. studios, Walt Disney Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, and Sony Pictures have released most of their titles free of region coding. MGM and Lionsgate have released a mix of region-free and region-coded titles. 20th Century Fox released most of their titles Region A-coded pre-Disney merger. Now, most of their post-Disney merger content is region-free. Boutique film restoration and distribution company, The Criterion Collection, uses US region coding (Region: A) in all Blu-ray releases, with their releases in the UK market using UK region coding (Region: B).

It is up to the distributor/studio if they wish for their BD releases to be region-free.

If you play a region-coded film, for example, if you play Region: B encoded 1984 on a Region: A player, it will display a title card with a message saying that this disc will only play on Region: B players (picture above).

Author(s) : Æ Firestone