To freely change the Blu-ray region of your player, you must jailbreak it. Region Encoding on Blu-ray is not nearly as prevalent as it is on DVDs, but it is sufficiently frequent to be annoying. No discs of consequence use Region C, so you can easily handle Region Free Blu-ray by buying a Region A player and a Region B player. Region A was assigned to the Americas, Japan and South East Asia, Region B to Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Australia and Region C was assigned to Russia, India and China. Latin America discs typically use Region 1 and 4.īlu-ray Regions are much simpler, there are only three Region Codes, A, B and C. A DVD can have more than one region setting, many UK discs were set to Region 2 and 4 so they could be played back in the UK or Australia. Region 0 and Region ALL are Region Free and can play in any player, but DVD releases from major studios and prestige releases still use Region Codes out of habit for DVDs. I don't believe Regions 5 (Russia, India and Africa) and 6 (China) were much used and Regions 7 and 8 were rarely encountered. Region coding on DVDs was a nuisance even in the early 2000s, with USA being assigned to Region 1, Western Europe, the Middle East and Japan to Region 2, Southeast Asia to Region 3 and Latin America and Australia to Region 4. The PlayStation 3 will enforce Region Coding on DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

Now that the PS3 has been discontinued and the console is essentially on life support in terms of firmware updates, I finally decided to investigate what it would take to get my PS3 working as a Universal DVD and Blu-ray disc player. I have as many UK DVDs than US DVDs and a fair number of UK Blu-rays. For many years I got by with ripping DVDs and Blu-rays and streaming content via the media server, but that tended to take up a lot of hard drive space and time when I could just simply run the discs I had legitimately purchased.

I knew that at some point the console was hacked and jailbroken, but I did not want to continually switch between official firmware updates and iffy custom firmware that could end up bricking one of the only ways I had to play high definition discs. When I picked up mine in 2010, I bought it more as a Blu-ray player than for games. Every system came with a disc drive and flat screen HDTVs were also affordable by the time system sales began to pick up with the Slim revision of the console. Although not as popular as its predecessor, the PlayStation 3 did almost as much to bring Blu-ray discs into the mainstream as the PlayStation 2 had done for DVDs.

Ps3 slim custom firmware