Dvd Player Region Code

[Elder Raman]

Ihave been watching some Region 2 dvds and have been switching back and forth between Region 1 and Region 2 without knowing that I could only do this 5 times. Now when I put in a US dvd, it says that I cannot change the region. Does anyone know a workaround to allow changing of regions more than 5 times?

I have done a bit of reading and saw a discussion that said that this is a firmware setting in the DVD drive. Is there a way to reset this back to the default through updating OS or reinstalling software?

It is a firmware issue, which has nothiing to do with the OS, so updating it or reinstalling isn't going to solve your problem. What you need is a way to change the firmware, which might be possible, but if it is, it's at your own risk, and you would definitely void your warranty.

Might not be easy. Some years ago, it wasn't hard to find region free drives from a fair number of manufacturers. But I've looked a few times in the past year or two "just because", and I don't recall seeing even one.

As you've found this a firmware issue with the drive (insisted on by the same companies who like suing downloaders). There's no fix via the OS, and no region hacks like you can get on some standalone players.

Sorry, that's not true. It's been done before by many people with great success. Even Apple can do it, if they choose. But before we can determine if it can be done for his model, we have to know what model it is and the installed drive.

I've never understood why Apple still uses drives with region settings. You can buy optical drives literally anywhere that are region free. It's actually difficult to find one that has region limitations.

This mostly depends on your DVD drive. Testing it is usually the quickest way to find out. The problem is that a lot of newer drives are RPC2 drives these days. Some of these drives don't allow raw access to the drive untill the drive firmware has done a regioncheck. VLC uses libdvdcss and it needs raw access to the DVD drive to crack the encryption key. So with those drives it is impossible to circumvent the region protection. (This goes for all software. You will need to flash your drives firmware, but sometimes there is no alternate firmware available for your drive). On other RPC2 drives that do allow raw access, it might take VLC a long time to crack the key.

Many people try to use VLC to play DVDs from regions their drive is not set to. However, the DVD drives on most new Macs have region lockout on the hardware level, so VLC will not necessarily be able to play discs from multiple regions. You may be able to play the disc by opening it as a Video_TS folder instead of a DVD, or by changing the method used by libdvdccss to decrypt DVDs (go to Preferences->All->Input/Codecs->Access Modules->DVD without menus->Method used by libdvdcss for decryption). If you play a lot of DVDs from different regions your best option is to buy a USB or Firewire external drive that you can set to the region you require.

Because it needs good relations with Hollywood. (Check the membership of the CCA.) Why? Well, guess who owns the copyright to the entertainment Apple sells through the iTunes Store. Incidentally, that's also the reason why Apple removed from Disk Utility the ability to rip audio CDs, which it had in early incarnations of Mac OS X (ripping with iTunes is not quite the same thing).

Okay, I cannot play any region 1 dvds, but I can play any movie dvds that I have burned with the computer. I think that just means that I have burned them to play in all regions. I went into System Preferences and set the DVD player to ignore DVDs when I put them in. VLC player will recoginize them, but will not play them. As for voiding the warranty with any solution, my laptop is no longer under warranty, so that is a non-issue.

For instance, the Apple installed drive in my Mac Pro insisted on a setting an initial region any time I put a commercial DVD into the drive. The Blu-ray read/write drive I put into the second bay has no restrictions. OS X doesn't pop up any kind of question about setting a region no matter what disk you put in the drive.

But you're right, Sony and Fujitsu (and probably Dell and any other well known maker) seem to use region specific drives. Which begs the question; if you can buy region free drives yourself while not committing any type of crime against the movie industry, why do makers such as Apple bother to use region specific drives?

Yes, that's the right info. If you want to try flashing the firmware on that drive, start by carefully reading, and re-reading the information given here on this site: =30 Ask questions in their forums if you're unsure about anything, before you do it.

It does seem to indicate that (at the time of writing) that particular firmware flash only worked properly if you did it from a Windows installation on your Mac, and on 10.6.7. so you may want to use Boot Camp and install Windows XP SP3 for that.

DVD region codes are a digital rights management technique introduced in 1997.[1] It is designed to allow rights holders to control the international distribution of a DVD release, including its content, release date, and price, all according to the appropriate region.

This is achieved by way of region-locked DVD players, which will play back only DVDs encoded to their region (plus those without any region code). The American DVD Copy Control Association also requires that DVD player manufacturers incorporate the Regional Playback Control (RPC) system. However, region-free DVD players, which ignore region coding, are also commercially available,[2] and many DVD players can be modified to be region-free, allowing playback of all discs.[3]

DVDs sold in the Baltic states use both region 2 and 5 codes, having previously been in region 5 (because of their history as part of the USSR), but EU single market law concerning the free movement of goods caused a switch to region 2. European region 2 DVDs may be sub-coded "D1" to "D4". "D1" are the UK only releases; "D2" and "D3" are not sold in the UK and Ireland; "D4" are distributed throughout Europe. Overseas territories of the United Kingdom and France (both in region 2) often have other regions (4 or 5, depending on geographical situation) than their homelands.

North Korea and South Korea have different DVD region codes (North Korea: region 5, South Korea: region 3), but use the same Blu-ray region code (region A). In China, two DVD region codes are used: Mainland China uses region 6, but Hong Kong and Macau use region 3. There are also two Blu-ray regions used: China uses region C, while Hong Kong and Macau use region A. Most DVDs in India combine the region 2, region 4, and region 5 codes, or are region 0.

Region-code enhanced, also known as just "RCE" or "REA",[4] was a retroactive attempt to prevent the playing of one region's discs in another region, even if the disc was played in a region-free player. The scheme was deployed on only a handful of discs. The disc contained the main program material region coded as region 1. But it also contained a short video loop of a map of the world showing the regions, which was coded as region 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. The intention was that when the disc was played in a non-region 1 player, the player would default to playing the material for its native region. This played the aforementioned video loop of a map, which was impossible to escape from, as the user controls were disabled.

The scheme was fundamentally flawed, as a region-free player tries to play a disc using the last region that worked with the previously inserted disc. If it cannot play the disc, then it tries another region until one is found that works. RCE could be defeated by briefly playing a "normal" region 1 disc, and then inserting the RCE protected region 1 disc, which would now play. RCE also caused a few problems with genuine region 1 players.

Many "multi-region" DVD players defeated regional lockout and RCE by automatically identifying and matching a disc's region code or allowing the user to manually select a particular region.[5][6] Some manufacturers of DVD players now freely supply information on how to disable regional lockout, and on some recent models, it appears to be disabled by default.[7][8] Computer programs such as DVD Shrink can make copies of region-coded DVDs without RCE restriction.

One purpose of region coding is controlling release dates. One practice of movie marketing which was threatened by the advent of digital home video was the tradition of releasing a movie to cinemas and then for general rental or sale later in some countries than in others. This practice was historically common because before the advent of digital cinema, releasing a movie at the same time worldwide used to be prohibitively expensive. Most importantly, manufacturing a release print of a film for public exhibition in a cinema has always been expensive, but a large number of release prints are needed only for a narrow window of time during the first few weeks after a film's release. Spreading out release dates allows for reuse of some release prints in other regions. For example, the film 28 Days Later was available on DVD in the United Kingdom before it was released in theaters in the United States.

Videotapes were inherently regional since formats had to match those of the encoding system used by television stations in that particular region, such as NTSC and PAL, although from the early 1990s PAL machines increasingly offered NTSC playback. DVDs are less restricted in that sense. Region coding allows movie studios to better control the global release dates of DVDs.

Also, the copyright in a title may be held by different entities in different territories. Region coding enables copyright holders to (attempt to) prevent a DVD from a region from which they do not derive royalties from being played on a DVD player inside their region. Region coding attempts to dissuade importing of DVDs from one region into another.

DVDs are also formatted for use on two conflicting regional television systems: 480i/60 Hz and 576i/50 Hz, which in analog contexts are often referred to as 525/60 (NTSC) and 625/50 (PAL/SECAM) respectively. Strictly speaking, PAL and SECAM are analog color television signal formats which have no relevance in the digital domain (as evident in the conflation of PAL and SECAM, which are actually two distinct analog color systems). However, the DVD system was originally designed to encode the information necessary to reproduce signals in these formats, and the terms continue to be used (incorrectly) as a method of identifying refresh rates and vertical resolution. However, an "NTSC", "PAL" or "SECAM" DVD player that has one or more analog composite video output (baseband or modulated) will only produce NTSC, PAL or SECAM signals, respectively, from those outputs, and may only play DVDs identified with the corresponding format.

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