Is the DVD region block hardware-based or software-based?

Question

In a PC

Answer 1

Software, encoding used anywhere is all software related, hardware uses electricity converted to specific foreces such as laser in a CD or DVD drive to carry out commands sent out by software.

Answer 2

Ok, what you said was kind of confusing, but i am going to assume your talking about the DVD drive, its mostly hardware based, but with more complex drives some of it may be slightly software based, such as drivers and other things such as Lightscribe.

Answer 3

Now, it is generally hardware based, in the DVD-ROM drive, as all current models implement RPC-2.

With older drives or hacked drives using RPC-1, it switches to software, and can be countered by utilities such as DVD Regionkiller.

A few utilities claim to defeat region control even with RPC-2 drives, but results may not be 100%.

For some drives, there are firmware hacks, possibly the most useful being "RPC2  autoreset", as it pretends to do hardware region control, but does not deplete the counter.

NB. In RPC-2 standard drives, there are 5 user region changes available, then the drive will lock to the last region used. In addition, there are 5 vendor resets to enable a refurbished drive to be re-enabled for region changing.

In addition to the official reset methods, some drives can be "hack reset", to restore a full set of user changes and vendor resets.

There is a war, between those who consider region coding to be an entirely artificial restriction, and of course, DMCA legislation against circumvention.

What makes region coding really stupid, is that an entirely DMCA-acceptable way to ignore it, is to have two drives, one for each region - and the most common case is region 2 UK versus region 1 US, as although there are format differences (PAL versus NTSC), they are insignificant in computer playback.