Need Techie Help! What are regionalization drivers?

[Saydrah]

What the hell are regionalization drivers, how do they relate to Apple as a company, and how do I get google to give me some actual information on them?

...ARGH.

Why I need to know is a long story, but trust me, I need to.

[draggar]

My guess would be drivers based on a region? Perfect example would be DVD drives. USA would have to be region 1 while UK would have to be region 2 (or something like that).

This is only my guess since I've never heard of it before. :)

[claidhmore]

Sorry lady, but I don't do Apple.

My wife was able to play region 2 DVDs on her Apple (decidedly region 1) with no problems or complaints, so I don't know about any specific drivers you would need DVD-wise. Are you trying to mess around with programs that are coded in Japanese/Korean/Chinese/etc? Those could be problematic but would either be a double-byte issue (asian languages use two bytes to reperesent a character) or a codepage ANSI issue (I think that's the term). The former may just be an issue if you don't have specific language-y fonts installed but the latter is a bit more difficult.

[digilight]

From what I can tell (and yeah google doesn't tell you much). Is that in different regions the equipment sold is slightly different requiring different drivers and such.

If this is relating to much such as Itunes or video content than it could be that the "Regional Drivers" are what will allow the music/video you purchase be playable.

Or if you were to buy a computer in say the UK and then try and use it with other hardware from Asia there may be problems.

This is just a guess but probably not true. The issue with the DVD drives is basically simple. You have to set your DVD drive to play which ever region you choose, I know that the USA is region 1. Most drives allow you to change the regions up to 5 times before you are locked in.

[Geek King]

I know some people who do import a lot of things, and are familiar with regional settings. Feel Free to PM me with the details of what you need, and I'll see if I can find something out for you.

[Seshat]

Another possibility is that they're drivers for such things as keyboard inputs and printer/screen outputs.

A Cyrillic keyboard designed for soviet languages has to have a different driver from a US-Latin or UK-Latin keyboard.

That said, I really don't know. That's my guess, however.