DVD region coding

I should have known that wikipedia would have an article on DVD region coding.
"There are many purposes that region coding can achieve, but a primary one is price discrimination. Price discrimination is the economic principle of demanding a higher price from buyers who are willing to pay more. Price discrimination is especially applicable to movies, because the marginal cost of selling one copy (or viewing) is quite small, giving the seller great flexibility in pricing. There is great disparity among the regions of the world in how much a person is willing to pay for a DVD, and region encoding allows a publisher to sell a DVD for less money in the regions where the demand is low and more where the demand is high.
Another purpose is controlling release dates. One of the traditions of movie marketing that the advent of home video threatened is the practice of releasing a movie (to theaters) later in some countries than in others. The threat from video tape was muted by the coincidence that television broadcast standards, and thus video tape formats, were for historical reasons regional. But apart from region coding, the DVD format is meant to be playable everywhere."

Until about two years ago, there were hacks for Macintosh computers to allow changing the region indefinitely. But now we seem stuck with being able to change it five times. The "VLC Player" app will play any region DVD, but it does not do a good job, for instance on my machine it freezes when I try to fast-forward. Does anybody know a better solution?
(Found this article.)
By the way, I'm surprised Apple has bowed to the movie studios on this one, they usually come down squarely on the side of the end users, and what with this being purely a business issue, not a legal one...

More from wiki:
"Region code enforcement has been discussed as a possible violation of World Trade Organization free trade agreements or competition law.[6] The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has warned that DVD players that enforce region coding may violate the Trade Practices Act.[7][8][9] The government of New Zealand is also considering a similar ruling.[10] This, supposedly, means that all DVD players sold in their territories have to be region-free.
Movie publishers misused region coding when they released older material with full region coding—there being no requirement, per the stated cinema-blockout justification provided, to restrict sales to certain countries. There are concerns, voiced by organizations such as the European Union, that region coding was solely an attempt to enforce price differentials."