It's worth doing if you want to be able to play movies from different regions, yes. How it works I don't know as I was lucky and got a downloadable hack for my Philips DVD player....
There is another way of doing it tho. There is some PC software called DVDSHRINK which allows you to rip and copy DVD films onto blank DVD discs. It compresses the information to allow a 9.whatever gb disc onto a 4.7gb disc, that you would get from Tesco or wherever for pennies.
It also makes them region free
It would just mean you'd have a bunch of duplicates tho....