Quote -  Out of curiosity...why in the heck are there different media standards all over the world? 

I'd read that Europe intentionally chose a different TV standard system to give their manufacturers first crack on new sales instead of on imports.

Today, companies seem to make very little effort to develop compatible systems on emerging technologies. Right now, 3D TV sets are just starting to come out and each manufacturer uses a slightly different system and 3D glasses from one format will not work with the others.

I'm surprised that a US DVD wouldn't work on a Japanese player. I was under the impression that both countries had the same system. Was the DVD finalized before shipping it? Disks that haven't been finalized may not play well with all players regardless of country. Depending on the format a DVD is recorded in, it may or may not play on other players. The VR format (the default for many DVD-R recorders) is fairly finicky with older players. I've got different DVD recorders and they all have various problems with disks recorded on the other players.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon