How to make DVD Player region-free?
 

Hello, I travel a lot and rent DVDs in Europe and in the States, so I am running out of region changes on my DVD player and getting very worried about this. How can I make my DVD Player region free without risking the player any other hardware/software part of my mac and the warranty?
Please help me. Thanks a lot.

Start here. You need to know the type of super/combo drive you have (see System Profiler). There are issues re legality but my take is that this is an industry's attempt to extort more money from users. You _will_ endanger your warranty at least as regards the drive. pm me for specifcs.

In System Profile, under ATA-3 Bus, it says:

MAT****A DVD-R UJ-816:

Manufacturer: MAT****A
Model: MAT****A DVD-R UJ-816
Revision: DXJ3
Serial Number:
Drive Type: CD-RW/DVD-RW
Disc Burning: Apple Supported/Shipped
Removable Media: Yes
Detachable Drive: No
Protocol: ATAPI
Unit Number: 0
Socket Type: Internal

How am I supposed to interpret all this?

the 4 stars stay work s-h-i-t...
it's a super-drive

the manufactureri is mat_s_h_i_ta

drive is a UJ-816

The firmaware version is DXJ3

You need to change the firmware version. pm me for details.

VideoLAN Client (http://www.videolan.org/vlc) is an application that will play any region DVD, usually. It may not be legal where you are so check that first.

VLC _is_ a much touted solution which has not worked for me.

Legal? How about moral and ethical? If I own a copy of, say the Lion King, puchased legally here in Canada, I cannot show it to my relatives/friends/associates in England on equipment that they have fully legally puchased unless I hack _their_ stuff or compromise their limit of region changes..... Does that seem right to you?

No, it s***s, undoubtedly. Unfortunately, for some reason the legal system assigns not only purchase but distribution and display limitations on movies: buying a movie in a particular country often limits you to watching it or showing it to others in that country (or affiliated area). This is probably to get around the fact that it would be very easy to buy whole movie rights in one country and then show the movie in another <sigh>. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the vast majority of us _weren't_ constantly paying for the greed and dishonesty of a few?

You do have some options, but due to this same legal situation, such changes _will_ void your warranty, as stated above.

A lot of people are steamed about this, but I can't see even a popular uprising changing anything, with the movie industry suffering so badly from pirates.

Good luck. :)

from Clytie

I'm not sure about the legal situation in Australia, but in the United States the limitation of watching only movies purchased in a particular country is strictly a technological limitation, not a legal one. Now, the US does have the execrable DMCA which disallows bypassing anti-piracy measures, but it does not limit the viewing of properly licensed movies no matter what country they were purchased in. So if you buy a Japanese DVD player, for example, you are free to watch all the Japanese DVDs you can get with no legal limitation.

Trevor

I would love to use VideoLAN (which I downloaded) but it doesn't play DVDs and it only plays the first minute or so of MPEG movies before the video freezes and only the audio goes on
I posted about this in the VideoLAN website forum but if anyone has experience and knows how to solve this please let me know.

Thanks for the info, Trevor, maybe there is hope, after all!

Do you know if there is any active lobbying going on about this issue? It really is a stinker for the vast number of people who are sucked in by the glamorous option of a DVD-player in their laptop, only to find they can only play certain movies. There have been anguished queries about it on our local Mac user group. Surely we can show some progress, some hope at least that this will be resolved (or that the retailers will have to show large, clear signs stating that the DVD-drives will only play movies under specified conditions.

from Clytie

No. Who would the lobbying be directed at? As I said, US law does not make any mention of regions, etc. so you/we can't lobby our representatives in the government.

Do you want to lobby the manufacturers? They aren't interested--the current region set up gives them more profits and was only set up after extensive bickering among all the manufacturers involved.

My uninformed impression of the reason it was originally set up, though, was because of the rampant piracy of movies and CDs in places like Hong Kong, where everybody buys pirated DVDs and CDs for tiny amounts of money. Setting up the region limitations was meant to contain that piracy to the areas where it was already happening and stopping it from spreading outside of those areas.

Trevor

Lobbying? Bah! What's the target? This isn't a matter of law! These manufacturers do it to extort more $$ and i guess they keep doing it because their bean-counting drones figure it works.

I say the answer is more small "a" anarchical. There is a community dedicated to 'fixing' this problem.... over at the Firmware Page.. Strengthen the resistance. Show them that if they can build it, we can crack it.... Come to think of it I guess this is a form of lobbying.... Maybe they'd get the message.

The usual break issue as to whether someone flashes the firmware is warranty. First off, sometimes you have to take a chance and just stand up for what you believe. Really the only issue the firmware change could be linked to would be the drive itself. Nothing else is affected. And you can restore the original firmware if you want. Eminently arguable, I think. And I have not heard of an 'altered' machine being refused warranty service, my own included.

Hi there! Any solutions for MacBook Pro and MacBooks, VLC does not seem to work on these drives?

Yes. Matshita/Panasonic drives are notorious for being resistant to VLC. Unfortunately, there's no firmware solution for newer Matshita drives either. I don't know what drive Apple is using for the DL drive in the high-end MacBook Pro. If it's not a Matshita, changing to that drive might be the solution.

Thanks Las_Vegas! Does anyone know make of MackBook Pro Drive, is that a solution (although it would invalidate the Warranty?)?

Quite a few people out there are still looking for a solution anyone have any other ideas?

I know for myself, being a huge kung fu film fan in general like to buy movies from asia before they come out in the US - like jet li's new film fearless, owned it for a while now.

Those are all different region dvds over there, so what I do is purchase my foriegn film, rip it to my pc using dvd shrink as region free back up and then burn the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS to a blank dvd and it plays on my dvd player with no problem

however this is a pc app

there is a mac app that is very similiar to DVD shrink, but i can't think of the name, hopefully someone can recomend a few

For the UJ-816, check out http://superdrive.cynikal.net/

Somehow the author of these firmware hacks got discouraged (by THEM ?), so for now, I'm not aware of any region free hacks and it's a real shame since there are no copyright provisions at all to cover market segmentation, THEY just do it because THEY can.

This works
 

Being legally minded, you probably do not want to use "MacTheRipper" to copy your DVDs to your hard disk as region free and burn them to recordable DVD media as regon free, or with a new region, using Toast 6.1 or later, or even play them direct from your hard disk.

You probably do not want to know that "MacTheRipper" can be downloaded free from:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22715

You probably also do not want to know that links to full instruction come with the "MacTheRipper" download.

Nick

But you might want to know that if your DVD player is not region free, neither VLC, nor MacTheRipper will be able to access the data on the disk in the first place.