Much of the rest of the world can probably use either PAL Video OR Region 2 DVDs --- for which the "West Wing" is available. These are not always for the same countries, however.

There are three different color TV systems in the world:

• NTSC; used in:
  • United States
  • Canada
  • Japan
• PAL; used in:
  • Britain
  • Most of Europe except for France
  • Australia/New Zealand
• SECAM; used in:
  • France
  • Russia
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Most of the rest of the Middle East

But the DVD Regions don't correspond to the standards (the above list is made up of real standards --- different ways the signal is broadcast --- the DVD regions seem to have been invented to slow down pirating copying ("Because DVD is subject to the same issues of piracy and market sharing that govern the entire video industry, region encoding was introduced to set geopolitical boundaries for compatibility of DVDs and players.")

One can buy a multi-region DVD player or even take some of the inexpensive players and hack into them to change them to play different regions that what they were set to play when they were shipped (the link on hacks was sent to us by Joel Down - it is from the UK so most of the emphasis is on turning Region 2 to Region 1 or Region Free but those models that are the same as the ones sold in the US are going to be just as easy to do in reverse).

• Region 0; Region Free (should play on any DVD player)
• Region 1; used in:
  • United States & Territories
  • Canada
• Region 2; used in:
  • Britain
  • Most of Europe & the Middle East (note: some of these use SECAM)
  • Japan (note they use NTSC)
• Region 3; used in:
  • Southeast Asia
• Region 4; used in:
  • Austrailia/New Zealand (note they use PAL)
  • Much of South America
• Region 5 used in:
  • Much of Africa
  • Pakistan
  • North Korea
• Region 6; used in:
  • China

So much of the world would fall under either PAL and/OR Region 2, except for the United States and Canada and other countries that are both NTSC AND Region 1 and those countries that are both SECAM and not Region 2.

See a complete chart of countries and Regions and Standards.