Are there any region free Blu-Ray disk players?

Question

as in, it can play dvds and blurays from america, england, austrailia, japan, etc.

Answer 1

Blu-ray Discs may be encoded with a region code, intended to restrict the area of the world in which they can be played, similar in principle to the DVD region codes, although the used geographical regions differ. Blu-ray Disc players sold in a certain region may only play discs encoded for that region. The purpose of this system is to allow motion picture studios to control the various aspects of a release (including content, date, and in particular price) according to the region. Discs may also be produced without region coding, so they can be played on all devices. The countries of the major Blu-ray manufacturers (Japan, Korea, Malaysia) are in the same region as North America. As of early 2008, about two-thirds of all released discs were region-free.

Major studios have different region coding policies. Paramount Pictures and Universal Studios have released all of their titles region free. Sony Pictures and Warner Bros have released most of their titles region free, however the titles released by Warner which are region coded, come from their New Line sub-division. Lionsgate and Walt Disney Pictures have released a mix of titles that were region free and region coded. 20th Century Fox has released all but one of their titles region coded.

However, since the demise of the HD-DVD format which did not support Region Coding, the majority of Blu-ray releases are now region coded.

In the Blu-ray region coding system, the United States is placed in region A while regions B and C are used for countries which can experience localization delays before U.S. titles are officially released. The opposite, though, is sometimes true and a few new titles such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Running Scared were released in certain European countries before the U.S. release. In response to the DVD region system, multi-region and region-free DVD players became dominant in certain markets; certain Blu-ray player models have been modified to allow for playback of Blu-ray discs from Regions A and B and DVD discs from Regions 1 and 2.

Regions for Blu-ray standard

     A: East Asia (except Mainland China and Mongolia), Southeast Asia, North America, South America and their dependencies.

      B: Africa, Southwest Asia, Europe (except Russia and Kazakhstan), Oceania and their dependencies.

      C: Central Asia, East Asia (Mainland China and Mongolia only), South Asia, Europe (Russia and Kazakhstan only) and their dependencies.