I worked with one of the guys who was part of the 4-5 people that cracked the original DVD region coding back when DVD players were like $500+. His hobby is reading chipsets and hacking the base programming. Yes, he's a massive nerd.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but JB HiFi (in Australia) has new stocks of the SONIQ BD100 players, which can be region hacked for DVD (to all region) and region changed for Blu Ray via the remote