I've been trying to find out the same thing, you can get a pop-up box in windows asking to change the DVD region but I can't find a similar app for linux.
 
I looked on a DVD firmware page and it couldn't find much more about it. If you do manage to find a solution please post it because I'd really like to know.

Unfortunately i am not that familiar with linux yet to say there is a way of changing the firmware of your drive (I am sure there is) but i changed the firmware of both my drives using a start up disk and the updated firmware from this site http://www.firmware-flash.com. As for the software issue i am afraid i cant help you.
 
(Be careful if you do update your firmware as it can ruin your drive if not done properly)

I don't know about Xine (I only played with it for a short while before giving up and going back to mplayer in disgust) but while I was trying to get DVD playback through my Hollywood Plus MPEG decoder I found that mplayer pretty much ignored the discs region code. The downside though is that mplayer doesn't fully support DVD menus yet and as such, I had to specify the starting title, audio and subtitle tracks by hand which was a PITA, particularly on discs loaded with lots of extras (trying to find the movie on a disc with 26 seperate titles is not fun...). Subtitles are a bit flaky in mplayer as well as is audio/video synchronisation but I'm not sure if this was caused by me trying to pipe the video into the H+ or some fault in mplayer.

Ok thanks thats great, if you use "lsdvd" that comes with acidrip you might easily be able to locate the movie on the disc.
 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/acidrip/

Ok, after more testing I've found xine does indeed play any region DVD on my region 2 hitachi player. It takes a bit longer to load sometimes tho because it has to search for the CSS keys (thats how come I didn't think it was working the first time). Some of my region 1's only took a few seconds, some took over a minute, but they all loaded eventually.
 
Hope this helps.

It seems that thing are as I suspected.
 
region decoding is dependant of the software.
 
Thanx

Greetings ,
 
The first guy who started with his post was talking about windows ? Cause i think i saw something about powerdvd etc.
 
If yes,then you can try with `remote selector'
 
www.visualdomain.net <------ You can obtain that from there
 
I remember'd that cause i was using RSelector with my dxr3 when i was using windows
 
Otherwise if it's not about the software that'll do the trick as well.Check it's site.
 
You can also update your firmware.Which you must be kinda cautious though.
 
As for linux , well no region problem at all.
 
Farewell

Just bought my favorite film "Where Eagles Dare" region code 1
I am in Europe and the dvd play's perfectly in Xine.
Just as I figured, region decoding is software dependant,
that or my Ide cd player is multiregion!

Greetings,
 
Almost all the dvd/dvdrw are region free nowadays
 
Some of em arent so the only way is the firmware
 
My combo fortunately in my laptop is region free also
 
You're lucky too
 
Farewell