usb dvd region free question - vista

[carolamrt]

I beg your forgiveness already for what is probably a very lame and trivial question.

I have a lovely HP Entertainment Notebook PC with 21 inch screen. I have a crappy old WEGA TV, 20 inch screen, that I never watch. I have an addiction to British TV.

I waited for years for some of my favorite TV series to release their newer series in Region 1 format and finally Amazon sent me an email suggesting I purchase a Region Free DVD player. I did eagerly and now have something like 75 DVD's lined up and I am almost happy.

The only thing is that this DVD player won't work on my PC, just on my old TV, which is sitting in my living room which has no air conditioning. Now I have to decide whether to watch the DVD's in the heat, watch something else on my PC and wait until Fall, or perhaps switch my internal DVD to region 2 and leave it there for a month or two while I watch the Region 2 DVD's and then switch it back.

My other thought is buying another DVD player and connecting it via USB port. But I can't figure out by googling around whether the settings that control the Region, which can be changed only 5 times, will affect both players, or is there a separate setting for each DVD player. If the settings are separate then I'm buying one today.

Does this quesiton make sense? If someone could just point me in the right direction I would be grateful. I suppose I could just buy one and see what happens, as long as I am careful and don't get trapped in Region 2 forever.

[nitroshift]

Region settings are unit-related. That means that you change the region on a specific drive, not all of them.

[Tripredacus]

I had considered, at one point, to have two DVD drives and set each to different regions. I don't watch movies on my PC anymore so that never really happened. Here is what I found out while researching it back then.

- You can change the region on a drive up to 5 times. The 5th change will lock it at that region.

- You can "start over" and get your 5 changes back by flashing the drive firmware.

And of course the other option was to use two drives.

[CoffeeFiend]

There's always the option of buying a common drive for which there is RPC-1 firmware available (assuming it's legal in your country -- I'm no laywer). There's also some popular utilities that bypass this kind of stuff like AnyDVD and some players that pretty much just ignore region coding like VLC. Or you can do like me and rip them to MPEG4 (H.264, XviD or similar) and play them over the network.

[IrnBruKid]

You could always install XBMC media center on your pc as I have used it to successfully watch the few region 1 dvds I have with my region 2 drive. XBMC is a great free and open source media center app that is great for streaming videos and watching dvds.

EDIT: Sorry didn't realise this thread was as old as it is when I posted.

Edited August 16, 2011 by IrnBruKid