Region free Intel Mac?

[petteri]

I've been searching around for a while and it seems to be the case that the Intel Macs CANNOT be made to either play or rip DVDs that are not the same region as your mac. Can anyone confirm this? This puts a major wrinkle in my plans to convert to a mac based system for my home theater setup. I have quite a few DVDs that I purchased from overseas.

I'm confused as to using a external drive, would this be a solution? A bit messy perhaps, but if I can hide it away and control everything though the apple remote no worries. Thanks for any tips!

Peter

 

[gauchogolfer]

VLC Player can usually play any DVD regardless of region. Give it a Google.

 

[petteri]

VLC Player can usually play any DVD regardless of region. Give it a Google.

Oh, forgot to mention I've tried this on my wife's MacBook. Only works on some R2 DVDs. Mactheripper never works. Does Handbrake stripthe region coding? Thanks!

 

[gauchogolfer]

Oh, forgot to mention I've tried this on my wife's MacBook. Only works on some R2 DVDs. Mactheripper never works. Does Handbrake stripthe region coding? Thanks!

Handbrake should strip off the coding, IIRC. I don't rip many DVDs to my HD, so I don't have much experience.

VLC didn't work for you to play the DVDs?

 

[petteri]

Handbrake should strip off the coding, IIRC. I don't rip many DVDs to my HD, so I don't have much experience.

VLC didn't work for you to play the DVDs?

No, well it did work for a Region zero DVD and one of my Region 2 DVDs (Three Colours Blue) (je parle francais, mais tre mal, ), but the others I tried didn't. I haven't tried all my R2 DVDs. The ripping to HD really would be OK, but I'll really have to invest in a RAID setup sooner than I planned. I've also got about 350 GB of music ripped to FLAC format to deal with. Don't know what I'm going to do about those with the MAC yet....

 

[disconap]

A RAID would speed up Handbrake, but it can rip to a smaller filesize (avi) as far as general space is concerned.

 

[teckisnow]

Region coding is a must

the player requires that your discs region coding to match or else the disc will be ejected and the player refuses to read the disc
so far i have been ripping discs that match the region coding on my MBP and for those that don't match, i use my pc (with region, CCS and other whatchamacallit cracks installed) to copy the video TS folder on to my media HDD (250GB in an external FW casing, probable moving to a NAS with 2 terabytes) and then converting to MP4 (avc, h.264 codec) thru the MBP.
it's a bit long winded but then i have an unadulterated copy of my DVD in a digital format on portable harddisk that is accessible by both PC and MACS.
come to think of it, as i am writing this, why not play the folders using DVD player direct and not be bothered with chasing every new codec that comes along!!!! hhhhhhmmmmmmmmm food for thought, must try it i shall!

 

[balamw]

I'm confused as to using a external drive, would this be a solution?

Here's how it (should) work.

1) Buy external drive. Set region code to desired region.
2) Insert your DVD in the external drive
3) Rip it to the HDD, removing CSS in the process.
4) Remove the External drive and put it aside until next time.
5) Play your ripped file using the remote as if it had been from your main region.

i.e. you only need the external drive to rip the content.

As the previous poster, you could also always use a whole other machine to do the ripping and move the non-region coded files over. Like the previous poster, I've used a PC to do some out of region rips.

B

 

[petteri]

Thank for all the tips everyone! I guess an exteranal drive is the way to go then! I'll also get a RAID set up to store everything on HD. Anything I rent from Netflix would be region 1 so that I can just pop into the computer and play. I only rip DVDs and CDs I own!

Now would a Mac Mini be able to do all of this? Thanks!

 

[macinsense]

Now would a Mac Mini be able to do all of this? Thanks!

Yes, I own a Mac Mini and have no trouble copying DVD's to my HD's (one internal and an external).