Does anyone know how to Unregion the DVD drive ?

[Happy Sponger]

Hey peoples from all over the world!

I'm currently in the USA and I bought a MB Pro, as I'm from the UK I have a few UK dvd's I've been watching as well as USA dvds, although unfortunately Ive used up my allocated region changes, on the dvd drive.

So now what ?

Does anyone know how you can over come this issue ? Seems pointless to limit the times you can change a region on a dvd drive these days... Maybe Im not in the know... why would this happen? .... Can someone fill me in ?


Thanks for you time..!!!

Its always a pleasure and never a chore!


Peace..

 

[prism]

All I can say is if your MBP is equipped with a Matshita drive, you are most certainly out of luck as there is no way to dezone it! On the other hand if you are one of the lucky few to have the LG drive equipped MBP (its a luck of the draw), do a google search on the model because you can dezone it.

 

[janey]

Use VLC. If I remember correctly, it ignores region codes. Not as nice as DVD Player, but it works.

http://videolan.org

also, they exist so you can't buy $1 dvds in china and play them in the US. the same dvd is different quality/different price depending on region. Crappy, I know, but there are ways to get around that

 

[hircus]

Use VLC. If I remember correctly, it ignores region codes. Not as nice as DVD Player, but it works.

http://videolan.org

also, they exist so you can't buy $1 dvds in china and play them in the US. the same dvd is different quality/different price depending on region. Crappy, I know, but there are ways to get around that

Well, the $1 DVDs from China are most likely pirated anyway, so they'd be region 0 (no region encoding). In Indonesia (err.. region 4? not sure), at least, the official DVDs are not *that* cheap ($8 for local productions), so the pet peeves of us with multi-region collections is that it's stopping us watching movies that are not even available in region 1/2!

I've heard reports that new Macbooks are not using the Matsushita drive anymore, which might be a good thing. With Matsushita and OS X 10.4.7 and above, raw reading from a region-encoded DVD is disallowed, so VLC can't help you at all. I'd suggest getting an external DVD drive from, say, Addonics.

 

[Erasmus]

Um, how about using MacTheRipper?

(google it)

Then burn it to another DVD. You'll have to do it for each DVD, which will drive you bonkers, but it'll work, and it won't involve any hardware changes.

Aah. If you can't read at all other region DVDs, this method won't work.

 

[e12a]

"unregion-ing" a drive involves reflashing a modified firmware, i dont think the matshita drive is popular enough for anyone to attempt it.

 

[hircus]

"unregion-ing" a drive involves reflashing a modified firmware, i dont think the matshita drive is popular enough for anyone to attempt it.

It's not the lack of popularity (it's used heavily in Apple notebooks), it's that the guy who was working on unlocking the firmwares for Macs have stopped his work.

 

[island]

My 3 week old MacBook has one of these M drives so they are still using them.