What is RCE/REA?
RCE, or Regional Coding Enhancement (also REA), is another fix in the coding system that is designed to prevent discs from playing on region-free players. Realizing that more and more region-free players are appearing, the movie industry added another layer to the encoding, which contains program code that checks for the proper region setting in the player. If there is no region encoding, the disc is rejected. However, if the player is manually set to the region of the disc, the disc will play properly. A grey area involves players which automatically detect the disc region and change to that setting – some of these appear to operate and others do not. RCE/REA, however is still not very common in discs. Most region-free players that are sold now will play RCE/REA discs; and while there is no guarantee that a new round of fixes will not occur in this cat and mouse game, there may be limits on how far this can go, as the engineering depends upon the design of DVD disc drives, which may n
