Regionless DVD Players for Mac OS X?

spooje would like to get to the core of the following issue: "Since a new Rochester DVD only store, Global DVD, just opened up with a large Asian section I decided to rent several. When I got home and popped one in my Mac (Sawtooth G4 running Mac OS X 10.2) it brought up a dialog box telling me the DVD was region 3. I could switch to region 3 mode, but I could only do this 4 more times. Since my DVD-RAM drive is supposed to be all region does anyone know of a workaround or patch for the Apple DVD player, or maybe even another DVD player for Mac OS X?" If this question sounds familiar, then it might be because, last week, Ask Slashdot ran a similar article, which focused on a Windows utility which did this.

Comments

Re:Apple's "generally pro-consumer stance"--phooey

[Draoi]

Dude, this is outside the control of Apple. It's a function of the drive firmware (for RPCII drives, which all are these days). The MPAA insisted that DVD drive vendors transition from RPCI to RPCII, thus taking control of this away from the software authors. Apparently, too many people were overriding this in software ... :-/

For RPCII, the drive firmware itself decrements the region count - the only way to circumvent this is to re-flash. So don't blame Apple - all users of bare DVD drives now have this 'feature'

Re:Videolan

[blamanj]

Question. If the region control is in the drive firmware, how can it be bypassed by a software only solution? Don't all read requests go through the drive firmware?