Hi all

I have a Sony BDP S300 bought in the States. For all purposes, my impression was that this is 'Region 1' and NTSC. (as in DVD land)

A friend guarantees that with Blu Ray, all this format and region differences dissapeared, but I didnt believe him

He just came back from Rome and brought a bunch of discs with him. We played Body of Lies and to my surprise the movie played flawlessly

However, when I inserted the Twilight Blu Ray, a message comes up on the screen, in Italian, which I believe says something like, this disc cant be played because of the region uncompatibility of your player

What's the story here?

thanks
J

Region coding is still very much alive. It is less strict than before, but still in place. Instead of ~6 regions with DVD, there are now 3 Blu-ray regions - A, B, and C. The US, Canada, and Japan are all region A. Most of Europe is region B. And most of Asia (besides Japan) is C. That's the simple version, but you can find a full country-by-country breakdown online if you searched.

Now not all discs from any given region are necessarily region locked. There are plenty of region free (or region ABC technically) US releases that can be played anywhere in the world. There are also plenty of region ABC titles coming from Europe (and pretty much everything in the region C territories is region ABC, as most things seem to come out later there and there doesn't seem to be much interest in importing their titles). There are sites, like www.blurayregioncodes.com, that will give you the region coding info on released titles so you know whether they are safe to import or not.

Assuming you have a US region A BD player, you are able to play any region A and any region ABC/free titles. There are other concerns, like whether foreign titles have English audio and/or subtitles, and some titles are even encoded in the 1080i50 resolution that many US TVs and BD players don't support. But you can find info on these things online as well - the aforementioned blurayregioncodes.com has notes that say whether a title is 1080i50 / 50 hz or not, etc.