DVD Regions

Fidelis

I just recieved some DVD's from a mate who was in Malaysia and I remembered that thing about the regions on DVD's.

I recall seeing on TV that the home DVD units for televisions lock themselves after viewing 3 or 4 dvd's in region 1 or 2 or whatever. Does this apply for pc's ?

I'm not even sure of what region they are, and I'm worried that if I put them in that I'll lock the pc dvd player to the Malaysian region (whatever that is). I've only actually played one dvd on my pc ever, that was from the local Chartbusters.

Can any knowledgable people out there help me ?

strat

Afaik u can chaged the region about 3-4 times b4 it gets locked and then there some region free players and then some ones that can be hacked to be region free. Go to some where like this for that kinfa info.

yankinlk

or here:

http://www.dvd.reviewer.co.uk/news/feature.asp?Index=2993

Tom Dunne

Originally posted by Fidelis
I recall seeing on TV that the home DVD units for televisions lock themselves after viewing 3 or 4 dvd's in region 1 or 2 or whatever. Does this apply for pc's ?

It's actually the other way around - the home DVD player should refuse to play any disk other than the region it is designed for, the software on the PC will play them up to five times before locking into one region.

TD.

Fidelis

I've done some more researching and found a program to help me. But in the readme contained with the program there comes the following line; "You will need a properly set up WNASPI32.DLL to use this program".

What exactly does this mean ?

sutty

I wouldn't trust a program to do that.

The region protection is done on the drive its self and not the OS, If you have a 6x Creative drive, you can replave the firmware with an HITACHI one of the right sort, you will get a region free drive, however the player you use ay not be, so look into that a bit more. a point to note, my 6x ceative drive is now picked up by OS's as a

HITACHI DVD-ROM GD-2500

Fidelis

Sorry, I should be more specific. I found a firmware crack that is designed for my Hitachi GD 5000 and I understand that it's like a cpu's BIOS etc. but what does that line of text mean ?

"You will need a properly set up WNASPI32.DLL to use this program"

sutty

it may be that the program needs the file to access the firmware, have you tryed to find it on your system?

if its not there the site you got the program from should have the download, or try a search on goolge

Fidelis

Ah yes, I just found it on my system, I'll give it a whirl, thanks

Stephen

Some DVD drives can be made region-free by putting a jumper on a particular set of pins at the back of the drive.

For instance, mine ( a generic 10x DVD rom ) is region-protected out of the box, but when i put a jumper on a pair of pins beside the digital audio output and then press the two buttons on the front of the drive during OS boot, it becomes region free

You can download a program that will tell you whether your drive has region protection or not, and if it does, how many region changes remain. I think its called driveinfo.exe/zip, have a look on google.