Tech Questions

[Jon_Samuelson]

I know there are a lot of guys on here that are pretty tech savvy, and so I thought I might make a thread which allows us to group questions about tech things in one place.  Of course my motivation is mostly selfish, because I have a question I'm having trouble finding the answer to on the internet.  Just the same though, I think this thread could be a useful place to keep such questions grouped together rather than having a hundred individual threads.

My question...

I currently live in the Netherlands, but I'm from the U.S. and anticipate moving back there eventually.  I've bought a bunch of DVD's while over here, and obviously they are region 2.  I'm seriously considering building myself a HTPC, but I'm waffling about trying to put 2 DVD players into it (and setting one to region 1 and the other to region 2).  Alternatively I'm considering just ripping my region 2 DVD's into MP4's (or whatever) so that I can keep them on a hard disk.  My question is this, if I have a DVD drive on a Windows based machine, and it's defined as "Region 1", can I still use it to rip DVD's that are from other regions?  i.e.  is the regionality only relevant to watching the DVD's, and not to extracting their content?  I know I can just change the region of the DVD drive, but that only works 5 times, and honestly at this point I'd prefer to just have my movies available digitally and to watch them via Windows Media Center or XBMC.

[Lucien21]

You can get small programs that install on your hard drive that removes the region select from your DVD drive.

The one I use is RegionFree+Css.

I have a bunch of Region 1 discs I bought while on holiday in the States.