Some people like playing discs written for other regions because those discs can't be had in their native country. But playing those discs means you may lock your player to an unwanted region. For this reason, people who play discs from a lot of regions will often purchase players that ignore region codes. Regrettably, your Mac isn't capable of doing this.

For this reason, it's helpful to remove region coding. And when you rip a commercial DVD with a tool such as HandBrake, MacTheRipper, or RipIt, you do exactly that. Copies you make will be region free.

There's a fly in this ointment, however. The media drives inside today's Macs will not rip discs from one region when the drive is set for another region. The solution is to either play a bit of the original disc to switch regions or, better yet, use an external DVD burner for discs from other regions. These external drives don't have this "not my region" restriction when ripping discs.

Q. I have Toast Titanium, can I use it to rip my DVDs?

A. Toast and its sibling, the $50 , can't remove the copy-protection from a DVD. However, they're wonderful tools for extracting video from unprotected DVDs and converting video to other formats. Like Toast, the €39.99 (around $51) can be used to take unencrypted dual- or single-layer DVDs or Video_TS folders and burn them to single-layer DVDs.