In order to control distribution of movies and prevent piracy, many most DVDs are region protected to ensure that they cannot be played outside of their region of issue. In short, this means you can't play American DVDs on an Australian player and vice versa. To further complicate the matter, PC and notebook DVD drives are locked to the least region set  with DVD drives correspondingly locked after five changes of region code by the user.
 
It is possible to download '"hacked"' firmware to remove region code protection from some drives, however doing so is risky and voids the manufacturer's warranty. A far safer option is to use DVD Idle Pro to bypass region coding altogether.

DVD Idle Pro is a 700Kb download that installs between your DVD player software and your drive to decode DVDs to RAM or hard disk irrespective of the region. As well as unlocking the region code, DVD Idle Pro removes Macrovision analog protection (which can otherwise prevent you from watching your DVDs on older model TVs or through the VCR), allows you to back-up the CSS encoded movie files using DVD copy software and emulates a region locked DVD drive, allowing you to watch newer region code enhancement DVDs that check for a specific region code before playing.
 
To minimise wear on your DVD drive as well as extend battery life on notebook computers, DVD Idle Pro reads the DVD in bursts storing the decoded movie either in RAM or on the hard disk. We noticed that playback was slightly jerky for the first few seconds whilst the cache was initialised, however once the cache was stable, the movie played faultlessly with only an occasional read from the DVD drive. Some tweaking of the DMA setting and cache may be required on some computers, but for most users, DVD Idle Pro works well with the defaults.

The software is very easy to use with some on-screen help provided in poor translated English. We tested it by playing back a US Region 1 DVD and an Australian Region 4 on several drives set to region 4 as well as a ''hacked"' Pioneer drive set to no region protection. In all cases both the Region 1 and Region 4 DVDs played without problems.

Whilst DVD Idle Pro supports most software DVD players it doesn't work with hardware decoders such as the Real Magic Hollywood Pro, DVD-RAM drives and a few DVD drives, but the 30-day trial allows you to test your system before parting with your money. What could be fairer than that!