Explaining DVD Region

Everyone knows that DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a real pain. One of the artifacts of this is DVD regions. One might see error messages about these when you put a disc in a player and see an error message that disallows the disc to play. As I understand it, certain discs are intended to be played only in certain parts of the world, probably because other countries have different copyright laws than the producer. DVD players are probably legally required to make overriding this difficult, so changing the playing region is often a very technical thing to do. In fact, a lot of players limit the amount of times their playing region can be changes. Fortunately, all Windows computers that have DVD support expose an API element for switching the region.