Okay, as my friend just shipped me her Misfits (UK only show) DVDs so I can catch up on them over my holiday week- I am wondering if I should look at investing in a region free DVD player on my next day off... or does the X-box-360 play region 2 dvds as well as region 1 on a US Elite console?
Any confirmation one way or the other would be fantastic.
No, a region 1 Xbox is like any other DVD player - it will not play DVDs from other regions:
Each Xbox 360 console is manufactured for a specific DVD and game region, following international standards. The Xbox 360 console can only play discs that are sold in the same region as the console.
Your only option (short of modding the console, which you probably don't want to do if you play online) is to get a region-free DVD player or a region-free DVD-ROM and rip your DVDs into a video format that the Xbox recognizes to play them from an external drive or streamed from a computer.
Some computer DVD-ROM drives allow you a certain number of region changes, so you may be able to do that with the drive already in your computer (assuming you have one :)) instead of spending money just to convert this one DVD.
I realize this is an old post, but for future askers of this question, on most DVD players regions can be changed. There is no need to buy a new DVD player. You can program some to accept any region with a certain programming code, sometimes using region 0. Do the Internet search for the DVD player model number and keywords “region change”, and the instructions will usually come up. Usually a sequence of button presses on the DVD remote.
This makes sense — manufacturers aren’t going to make each DVD player specific to a region; they simply program them as such. I’ve changed several DVD players to do this, because I used to buy DVDs on eBay, often with a different region code.
For what it's worth the XBox One supports region-free media:
Supported regions and disc formats
Each Xbox One console is manufactured for a specific Blu-ray and DVD region, following international standards. The Xbox One console can play Blu-ray discs and DVDs that are sold in the same region as the console. See the following tables for the countries in each disc region.
Some Blu-ray discs and DVDs are not region-encoded or are coded to all regions. Region-free Blu-ray discs and DVDs will play on any Xbox One console.
Note Game discs for the Xbox One console are not coded to regions.
I have region 2 DVDs, and they do play in xbox 360. Maybe it is just me, but I am able to!
