Re: Wrestling With DVD Region Coding

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Wrestling With DVD Region Coding
Christopher Breen, Macworld.com
Wednesday, April 23, 2008 4:00 PM PDT

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,145029/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

Reader Yati K. faces a disc-based conundrum in the near future. Said
Yati writes:

I'm about to move to South Africa, and I have a small-yet-precious DVD
collection that I'd like to take with me. Since I purchased them for
use in the U.S., they're in the NTSC format, and not the PAL format
that TVs/VCRs/DVD players use in other countries, like South Africa.
I'm on the verge of purchasing a MacBook Pro, and I know that I'll be
able to play the NTSC- DVDs I already own on my Mac, but I was
wondering if you had any idea if the DVD Player application (or, more
importantly, SuperDrives themselves) support PAL-formatted DVDs, as I
may want to purchase some once I am there.

Your MacBook Pro will be able to play both PAL and NTSC discs, so on
that front, you're set. Where you're going to run into trouble is with
region coding. It's like this:

Thanks to pressures from the motion picture industry, commercial DVDs
are flagged with their region of origin. The majority of DVD players
are likewise region protected. For example, DVDs sold in the U.S. are
Region 1 flagged. When first inserting one of these discs into your
future MacBook Pro, you'll be told that you need to set the drive's
region coding to the same code as the disc. Do that and the region
code is set to Region 1. You're allowed to change the drive's region
five times--you do so simply by putting a disc with a different code
into the drive and playing it. After that, the drive is locked to the
last-used region.

The discs you purchase in South Africa will be Region 2 discs. When
you try to play one, you'll be prompted to change regions and you'll
lose one of your five opportunities to switch regions. Play a Region 1
disc and you have to switch regions yet again and lose another switch.

In the old days this wasn't a terrible problem as there were a couple
of easy workarounds. One was to use VLC (VideoLAN), a media player
that, unlike Apple's DVD Player application, cares not a whit for
regions. The difficulty is that the region-free stuff in VLC doesn't
work with the Matshita drives found in most of today's Macs. Region
coding information is locked in firmware and these drives refuse to
discuss region coding with VLC.

And, unlike with some earlier SuperDrives, it's no easy matter to
strip region coding from these Matshita drives. (And, just as with any
drives packaged with the Mac, stripping region coding mucks with the
drive's firmware, thus possibly threatening the integrity of the drive
and assuredly voiding its warranty).

That leaves you with two less-than-optimal solutions. The first is
that you can try ripping your discs with Handbrake or Mac The Ripper.
This turns the movies on your DVDs into standard movie files untainted
by any kind of region information. What makes this a less-than-optimal
solution is that the copy protection on some discs makes them
impossible to rip. Also, ripped movies can take up a lot of storage
space that you might wish to devote to more important files.

The other solution is to purchase an external Firewire or USB DVD
drive and play Region 1 discs in one drive and Region 2 in the other.
This suggestion earns weak praise because it will cost you something
and it's inconvenient to lug around another piece of gear.



I suspect SA will be in much the same position as in Australia where I
am - most of the DVD gear down here are region free and modern TV's are
NTSC/PAL compatible. Oz is region 4 and I have no problems playing discs
from any region. My guess is South Africa will be in the same position

Oz is like that today as the ACCC ruled that region coding was an
anti-competitive practice.
Before that you had to get your player moded to make it region free, perhaps
those mods are available in SA.

Your response addresses the root cause of the OP question but they also
specifically asked about MAC peripherals.
DVD drives for computers are shipped allowing up to 5 region code changes,
after which they are locked into whatever region code they were last played
in.

I believe there are still Region Free utilities running around that turn off
region coding on computer peripherals.




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