Gentleman, start your buying! Everyone take a look at which DVD you currently own... seriously the cheaper the better! Then hop on over to kindly ones at VideoHelp.Com. For DVD player 'hacks', start here:
http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks
You can enter in the make/model of your DVD player and see if there is a hack for it. Around Christmas, I went out to my local stores to see which players were currently available. The reason I said 'the cheaper the better' is that many of what we consider 'off-brands' here in the USA are really 'ON-brands' in many other countries- countries that often sell multi-region DVDs as mentioned above. So let's take the player I chose for instance. For $40 at Target I got a Daewoo DVG-9200N. Search for it and voila: Here is the info for that player
Read down, see peoples comment on which codes work and which don't and try the ones you feel safe with. On this player it was as easy as:
1) Turn on Player
2) Open Tray
3) With the remote, key in the numbers 1,3,7,9. They will appear as "X's" in the top left hand corner of the screen.
4) After keying in the numbers, promptly choose your region code you'd like, from 0-6. The region code you select will appear as a number, not as x's, as did the 4 number hack code.
5) Throw in a Region 2 Pal or NTSC dvd to try it out.
And it voiks lak a cham!
Since then I've bought different Region discs from all sorts of world-wide retailers. There's many UK programs and films I'm interested in. (everyone here at OT.Com HAS to see the series 'Spaced' from the same crew that did 'Shaun of the Dead'- there are some HILARIOUS SW references as well as other genre fanboy stuff) I've bought many a disc since then from Amazon.UK as they have decent shipping to the USA.
Anyhow, I digress.
You also want to look for if the player is listed as doing internal NTSC/PAL conversion. Just click on the 'DVD Compatibility' link and you'll get something like this:
Spec Page
On that page it'll tell you every bloody thing the DVD player plays, reads, encodes, etc. Look for a player that says 'Multisystem PAL/NTSC Convert' which will mean it can do internal conversion. Some players do better job at this than other. This particular Daewoo converts in true progressive scan while some others just interlace the converted image...
But perhaps I have spoken too much. LOL.