Boot camp; Multi region DVDs, and DVDs in general.

[Tumbleweed666]

Been looking at getting an iMac and one area where I'm struggling to find equivalents is in playing/reading/decrypting DVDs, especially when multi region is involved. It seems fairly random whether or not you can flash the DVD drive, or whether applications like region X will work. (If it makes any difference, I'd have a 2009 20in iMac, possibly too early for anyone to say what would or wouldn't work re the DVD drive?)

I see apps such as Handbrake and Mac the Ripper referred to but they dont seem as good a solution according even to Mac fans, as (for example) DVDecrypter for ripping. Should I be looking to run these either in a Windows VM under OSX, or Windows directly on the MAC? I do have a genuine Windows (XP) licence, so that would be an alternative. Its not something I do a lot but I don't want to find its not at all possible. If I boot Windows 'natively' on an iMAC (Is that 'Boot Camp' ?) should all the apps I mentioned and others that enable multi-region such as DVD43, work just as well on Windows on iMac as on any other PC?

 

[Ivan P]

Been looking at getting an iMac and one area where I'm struggling to find equivalents is in playing/reading/decrypting DVDs, especially when multi region is involved. It seems fairly random whether or not you can flash the DVD drive, or whether applications like region X will work. (If it makes any difference, I'd have a 2009 20in iMac, possibly too early for anyone to say what would or wouldn't work re the DVD drive?)

I see apps such as Handbrake and Mac the Ripper referred to but they dont seem as good a solution according even to Mac fans, as (for example) DVDecrypter for ripping. Should I be looking to run these either in a Windows VM under OSX, or Windows directly on the MAC? I do have a genuine Windows (XP) licence, so that would be an alternative. Its not something I do a lot but I don't want to find its not at all possible. If I boot Windows 'natively' on an iMAC (Is that 'Boot Camp' ?) should all the apps I mentioned and others that enable multi-region such as DVD43, work just as well on Windows on iMac as on any other PC?

I've used both DVDDecrypter and Handbrake, and I personally think Handbrake is 100 times better. The GUI doesn't overcomplicate things, and any user can easily set it up to do whatever you want without having to resort to an online guide or the like. I always found DVDDecrypter to be slightly overcomplicated, and if you didn't know exactly what to do you'd get lost very easily.

 

[Tumbleweed666]

I've used both DVDDecrypter and Handbrake, and I personally think Handbrake is 100 times better. The GUI doesn't overcomplicate things, and any user can easily set it up to do whatever you want without having to resort to an online guide or the like. I always found DVDDecrypter to be slightly overcomplicated, and if you didn't know exactly what to do you'd get lost very easily.

Thats good to hear I was just going by comments by other Apple users. What about multi region? Would a simpler soln be to buy a cheap external dvd that I know can be flashed and use that?