Friends, I wish to buy a dvd rom drive which is capable of reading all types of DVD disks of various DVD disk formats.What should be speed of drive in X to get hassle free movie experience. Is 16X enough or shall i have to wait for some more time for higher speed drives. Are there any dvd region free drives. I am not a geek type please help me as soon as possible. i live in india.

4X is plenty to play a DVD. I just buy the drive with the best software package. As far as the formats supported, it's usually written on the box or can be found at the manufacturers website. To go further with this, I never buy a CD-ROM drive as any DVD-ROM supports about any format out there for just a few dollars more.

About region free I've seen regionfree firmware versions on the net. Decide on the drive and see if you get that on the net. About the movies, a normal movie dvd plays at 1x speed because that's the original standard. For computer use it's better to be a bit faster but if you don't get a stable movie with a 16x DVD then you have trouble with your computer or a cheap DVD drive with a very bad error correction. I use Toshiba 16x DVD-Rom on my two computers. The older one is a SD-M1502 and I just found out it didn't read DVD +RW or DVD Ram but it's fine with movies. The newer one is a SD-M1712 and it reads all DVD standards, even DVD Ram at 2x speed. Not fast but I just tested that and it does the job. I've also seen a SD-M1802 on the net but according to the description it couldn't read DVD Ram! Besides that my both DVD Rom run very good and stable and until now I never had problems with a few scratches on CD's or DVD's. My advice would be the SD-M1712 and I would buy it again at anytime. BTW: The DVD Rom speeds haven't changed in about 4 years because it's been that long that I bought my SD-M1502 and it's 16x/48x so waiting for higher speed may take a while !!!