Tell me if a rumor's true...

[JoanieDark]

Heh, I have no clue where to post this, so I guess this place'll do...tell me if I should move the thread.

Anyways, I recently moved to the UK from US. My parents told me that Windows Media player can only switch between DVD formats about 5 times.

Stupidly a few weeks later I bought a Alice Cooper DVD set.

I don't want to be unable to watch my American DVDs, but I don't want to be kept from watching Brit ones either. So tell me, does Media Player really have a limit on # of times to switch format?

[cluberti]

It's actually not MCE, but the physical drive's firmware that has this restriction. And yes, there's a 5 change limit, built into the firmware of the drive itself. Supposedly you can have the manufacturer of the drive reset this a total of 5 times (for a total of 25 region changes), but that just sounds like a PITA to even attempt.

Of course you could always hack the firmware, but that can be dangerous and can lead to paperweights and replaced drives. There are also applications out there that I am aware of that can compensate for this sort of thing, but the only one I've ever tried is VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/), and it didn't work entirely right on my powerbook or my XP MCE machine (sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't).

Also note that this particular gem was perpetrated upon us by the studios and the MPAA, so thank them for this.

Edited October 24, 2006 by cluberti

[mark]

I recently received some promotional DVDs that were from the UK and as we already know, they won't play on a regular DVD player. Wrong region. I'm in the USA. 14 DVD videos and VLC played them all. It took it a couple of minutes to digest some of them but it played them all.

DL

[Delprat]

DVD drives are costing so much these days that buying two drives (one for each region) and stay legit is far from a PITA.

Of course i'm talking of DVD drives *for computer*...

but is this practice really legit ?

++

[jroc]

alot of DVD Players have 'region' free firmware...my Lite-On and BenQ have them....also some DVD Player Software can be found with 'region' free options.

[Plamdi]

Liton drives do not need the firmware flashed, there are cracks which do not touch the firmware to remove hardware region coding.

I suggest downloading DVD43, it will unlock most DVDs.

[abze]

AnyDVD workd great

[Taggs]

I have just not set my region on my DVD player when it asks and it seems to work with any region DVD.

One option is to buy another DVD drive and set this to the 'other' region. With a price tag from £18 for a new drive it is not worth all the hassle.

Taggs

[jcarle]

Just install AnyDVD and be done with it. It'll make your discs Region-Free.