A lot of later players didn't care though and were region-free.
> DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today
Some DVDs have less-than-stellar image quality even compared to other DVDs. The format doesn't mandate some fixed bitrate numbers, so it can be truly atrocious.
No kidding. Recently replaced my copy of war games. The DVD was 'ok'. But the later bluray transfers are much nicer.
Some of the early stuff was literally throw it on a telecine machine, encoded it, and ship it. With lots of film wobble and poor color especially in the red channel (due to a bug in early software). Plus poor encoding noise that didnt have a clue what to do with film grain.
Later on they actually physically clean the film first and scan a 4/8k rate first. Then the better ones a light touch on digital correction. Though some are very heavy handed and create poor a reproduction and you are better off with the previous DVD.
And if you travelled with your dvds, they still worked, unlike your netflix subscription today. (The need to bring your own player to match your disks doesn't change anything because your same laptop that you watch a stream with today had a dvd drive right in it before.)
Region coding was a problem, but simpler and just not as bad as todays streaming geofences.
In practise, average-price DVD players sold in Europe were compatible with NTSC in addition to PAL, but DVD players in North America and Japan only did NTSC.
We could buy DVDs on holiday in the USA and play them at home, but it was difficult to find a DVD player in the USA that would play a PAL DVD brought from Europe.
Similarly, it was reasonably practical to import obscure American or Japanese movies to Europe, but less so the other way round.
My wife & I were in the middle of the new dr who a few years ago, purchased on Amazon. (not rented and not prime, purchased, neither of us has prime)
Go on vacation and we could not access that show.
It doesn't matter how many other shows were available, the show I bought was artificially unavailable. Had I a dvd of the same show for the same money and the same laptop, it would have been available.
(Yes obviously I used a vpn and got around that. My awesomeness to overcome something broken does not make the thing not broken.)
I think at the time this was both less annoying and more easily circumvented. I think it only came up if you bought DVDs internationally, were moving between regions, or wanted to bring DVDs but no player on such a trip.
DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today, although a lot of older works need the lower resolution because special effects and the like weren't intended to be scrutinized at 4k.