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

VideoLAN

[Anonymous Coward]

VideoLAN Client

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Re:Videolan

[Matthias Wiesmann]

I tried it on a Powerbook 667. It works - menu navigation is kind of weird, but no fuss about regions.

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?

Re:VideoLAN

[troc]

Assuming you are using OS X and their latest dvd player, then just delete your preferences file and the count of 5 is reset :) I discovered this when I was messing around with accounts and had used all 5 changes on my own account so I was stuck in region 1 there. I switched to anotehr account only to find that account was at region 2 (default for europe) and had 4 changes left.....
Initially I though I'd need a region 1 account, region 2 account and so on but then discovered the vastly more simple deletion technique ;)

For OS 9 you need to obtain a patch for Apple's dvd player (2.7)- they are fairly easy to locate on the 'net :)

Videolan

[MrHanky]

Haven't tried it for OSX (haven't tried OSX at all), but Videolan seems to support OSX. AFAIK, libdvdcss doesn't care about region encoding, so any other player using that on OSX should work too.

try Region X.

[nuckin futs]

there's a bunch of utilities here
you can also try vlc as a last resort.

A seemingly nice resource for this

[denisb]

The Mac DVD Resource seems to be what you are looking for ?
Patches, info etc..

here's how to do it

[hype7]

get a patch for your drive, then get Region X; warning, direct download link to control the number of region changes you have left.

Works flawlessly for me, but usual disclaimers about fscking your dvd drive with a 3rd party mod apply.

-- james

I don't know

[Apreche]

much about Macs. However, I do know about changing regions on DVD drives. Inside most DVD Rom drives are these physical switch type things, and they are limited in number. Everytime you change the region one of them breaks. If they are all broken your drive is done for. The way to beat this is to change the region on the drive to region 0. This way it can play 99% of all the DVDs out there without changing every single time.

I also reccomend getting an Apex DVD player. Apex is this crappy brand name that makes legitimate dvd players you can buy in wal-mart for like 60 bucks. They are pieces of crap, shoddy workmanship, cheap plastic, etc. But they're DVD players for 60 bucks. Anyway many of the Apex DVD players have secret menus you can get by pressing secret key combinations on the remote control. You can find out which models and which key combinations with google. These secret menus are not advertised nor in the instruction manual, so apex doesn't get sued. But the menu pretty much lets you change region at will as many times as you want, as well as convert NTSC and PAL. It's pretty amazing for 60 bucks. And heck DVD on a big TV screen beats DVD on a little computer monitor any day.

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'

Try this...

[djupedal]

Until someone writes a script to do this, you may want to take a look at this normally hidden file:

/etc/authorization

(I use BBEdit...'Open Hidden Files'. I haven't tried changing this yet...I hack the hardware instead):

Starts at line 63...

<!-- Used by the dvd player to set the regioncode the first time
Note that changed the region code after it has been set requires a
different right (system.device.dvd.setregion.change)
Credentials remain valid indefinitely after they've been obtained.
An acquired credential is shared amongst all clients.
-->
<key>system.device.dvd.setregion.initial</key>
&n bsp; <dict>
<key>group</key>
<string>admin</string>
<key>shared</key>
<true/>
</dict>

=======
I posted this on MacInTouch back in September. I recommend using that site over /. for these types of questions :) Let me know if you can't take the not-so-subtle hint on how to mod the code...

DVD Patch

[NickeSvensk]

Go to http://perso.club-internet.fr/farzeno/firmware/ They have firmware patches for almost every DVD. I patched my Powerbook G4 with a patch from them. Now I play DVD's from all over the world. Great when I travel between europe and the states. Good Luch with your patching. Niclas