DVD region codes are a digital-rights management technique designed to allow film distributors to control aspects of a release, including content, release date, and price, according to the region. DVD video discs may be encoded with a region code restricting the area of the world in which they can be played.

The American DVD Copy Control Association in California requires that DVD-player manufacturers incorporate the regional-playback control (RPC) system—according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, an Australian government agency.

There are six different official regions and two informal variations.^{[citation needed]} DVDs may use one code, a combination of codes (Multi-Region), most codes (Region 0) or every code/no codes (Region All). The commercial DVD player specification requires that a player to be sold in a given place not play discs encoded for a different region; however, region-free DVD players are also commercially available. In addition, many DVD players can be modified to be region-free, allowing playback of all discs.

Regional lockout is the programming practice, code, chip, or physical barrier used to prevent the playing of media designed for a device from the country where it is marketed on the version of the same device marketed in another country.

Movies, released on DVD, Blu-Ray and UMD may be region-locked.

In the video game industry, Nintendo was the originator of regional lockout. Regional lockout in video games is when a piece of hardware is designed such that only software for that region is compatible. Most commercially-released console video games have region encoding.

The main regions are:

Nintendo Entertainment System is region-locked. Regions are: NTSC (North America), PAL-A (United Kingdom and Italy), PAL-B (other European countries). Game's region is recognized by console using 10NES chip. If the chip inside cartridge conflicts with the chip inside console, the game will not boot. Famicom, which sold in Japan does not contain a 10NES chip, but cartridges for Famicom are different shape than NES ones.