I intend to purchase a Power Mac, and as well as using it for a PC I
want to use it to watch DVDs (I don't have a TV).

My problem is DVD regions.  I have a legitimate need to view both
region 1 and region 2 disks, as I used to live in the UK and have a
large collection of region 2 disks, but want to rent DVDs from US
stores.

As I see it, I have 3 options, in order of neatness vs "legitimacy",
which I'd like advice on:

l.  Change the firmware/software on the drive.
	Obviously risky and against Apple's advice.  Web searching brings up
not much help on this but a couple of sites show how to do it.  My
main question is if I stuff it up, what's the damage?  Do I just need
to buy a new drive or is the whole machine screwed?

2.  Buy a second drive, maybe external, that is a different region to the main one.
	Is this possible?  I think the region encoding is enforced by the OS
as well as the drive so can you have 2 drives with 2 different regions
or is it 1 computer, 1 region?

3.  Buy a TV input card and a standard region 1 DVD player
	Yuck, but seems pretty surefire unless I've missed something.  Here
I'm after a recommentation for the TV card and any ideas about whether
there'd be a loss of quality.

Curse the film studios and their inconvenient protectionist ways.  Any
help much appreciated.

I think I found the perfect solution for you.  It will allow you to
play DVDs of any region on your PowerMac, the software is free, and
you do not have to hack your system, or buy a second DVD drive, or DVD
player.

Try out the free all purpose movie player known as VLC.  You can download it here

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Here is a sample of a message board with people who have had the same
issue as you being suggested to use VLC.

http://www.macworld.com/forums/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB1&Number=238473&page=18&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1

VLC is one of those rare free treasures.  Pretty nice!

Hope this answers your question completely and fully.