As far as macrovision and region encoding goes, you have three choices.
1. Buy a region free DVD player, most of these also disable macrovision.
2. update the firmware of your dvd player to retrofit the above functionality.
3. Use DVDDecrypter to rip the DVD and write it back out without region encoding or macrovision.

Personally I did (1) and bought a JVC player which works great. I then ended up with a Sampo player and did (2) as well.
Either way I can now link up the player where I want and play non R1 DVDs quite happily.