Mac DVD player region set?

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smellyjw

macrumors newbie

Original poster

• Jan 3, 2009

• #1

I'm just wondering if I set my macbooks dvd region to region 4 will my drive still pick up disc's with region 1 or 2 and be able to play in vlc?

 

dXTC

macrumors 68020

• Jan 3, 2009

• #2

No. You'll have to reset the region to 1 or 2 to play those discs again. On top of that, most DVD drives have a limited number of times the region can be set before the region becomes "locked."

Have you ever thought of setting the region to 0?

 

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smellyjw

macrumors newbie

Original poster

• Jan 3, 2009

• #3

dXTC said:

No. You'll have to reset the region to 1 or 2 to play those discs again. On top of that, most DVD drives have a limited number of times the region can be set before the region becomes "locked."

Have you ever thought of setting the region to 0?

Click to expand...

never heard of region 0. but again, i dont want to set my region to anything if i dont have too.

please see here https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/626250/

 

numbersyx

macrumors 65816

• Jan 3, 2009

• #4

smellyjw said:

never heard of region 0. but again, i dont want to set my region to anything if i dont have too.

please see here https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/626250/

Click to expand...

0 is the "all regions" setting i.e. no region restrictions - you cannot set it to that in any DVD drive that I've seen on a computer (not without a hack anyway)....

 

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larkost

macrumors 6502a

• Jan 3, 2009

• #5

You can't set a drive to be region 0. Rather a disk encoded to region 0 means that drives set to any region can play the disk. In truth a disk without region encodings is "region 0".

There are drives that can be set to be "region free", but I have never heard of any computer drives that can do this.

 

dXTC

macrumors 68020

• Jan 5, 2009

• #6

larkost said:

You can't set a drive to be region 0. Rather a disk encoded to region 0 means that drives set to any region can play the disk. In truth a disk without region encodings is "region 0".

There are drives that can be set to be "region free", but I have never heard of any computer drives that can do this.

Click to expand...

Region 0, for both drives and disks, is synonymous with "region-free". All the region bits are set to 0, thus not limiting to any particular region.

Setting a drive to Region 0 usually involves a firmware flash-- which is not exactly a trivial procedure, in most cases is done using hacked firmware code, and if one bit is off then the drive can be rendered useless. I haven't seen any firmware flashes for Mac internal drives, but then again I'm not in the market for that kind of hardware mod.