Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

my iMac won't play a Chinese dvd

A

aquazula

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 17, 2012
10
0
Hi there!! well recently a chinese friend lend me some dvds from chinese animations and i wanted to watch them on my iMac. After I insert the disc, it would automatically show up in the desktop and side bar in finder, but the dvd player won't open. I go to the Application folder, open the dvd player and nothing happens.

I guess it could be about the region of the dvd, but I really want to play it in my iMac. Can someone help me either telling me about other 3rd party programs or maybe someway to change the dvd player's settings in order to open the dvd?
 
Please, don't change the region of your DVD drive inside iMac, since the number of changes is limited.
That would be the most simple, but also the most stupid solution.

There are far better solutions:
1) Copy the DVD data to your computer, and open it with a smart video player
which could either change his region, or does not respect the regions thing at all. Try VLC!
2) Rip the DVD (making a virtual .iso image of this disc), then create a virtual DVD drive on your Mac,
change the region of this virtual DVD drive, mount virtual .iso image, and play it.
That would not harm: when the number of changes expires for this virtual DVD drive,
you could always delete it, create a new virtual drive, and use this trick again!

I could be mistaken at the minor details, but the main idea is that,
of course, there are workarounds for this stupid region limitation.
Once I encountered it (only once), and successfully solved it by the first way.
And its even better when there is a second way, just in case :) Yarrgh! :D
 
Last edited:
Long time ago....

when I used the DVD Player in Mac, I used to know that I am allowed to do 5 region changes before I can compromise the DVD drive. If you know the region and really want to see the DVDs, this can be a solution ASAP. Other is to get some software region-agnostic (as VLC was) and give it a try, maybe using it to play the VIDEO_TS files/folders in the root level of the disc (s).


:):apple:
 
Are you sure they are DVD!!!

Super VideoCD's are still big in Hong Kong & China.

You could have SVCD's.
 
QJMan said:
There are far better solutions:
1) Copy the DVD data to your computer, and open it with a smart video player
which could either change his region, or does not respect the regions thing at all. Try VLC!
Click to expand...
which smart video player would you recommend?

Nermal said:
VLC can play (S)VCD so try that.
Click to expand...
I downloaded VLC and tried to open the disc with it, but the software won't read it (it tried, but then it stopped with an exclamation sign)


I didn't know about being able to change regions, and even less there was a limit to it :p.. but oh well, QJMan's right in the matter on being foolish if I took that path... I was wondering if there was a dvd player that would just play the dvd, VLC sounded like a great idea, but it doesn't work... unless i'm doing sth wrong.. i just clicked on "file>open disc>chose disk"...


MacRumorUser said:
Are you sure they are DVD!!!

Super VideoCD's are still big in Hong Kong & China.

You could have SVCD's.
Click to expand...

Well, funny long story short... a japanese friend gave it as a gift to my father, and he gave it to me... (funny because why would a japanese person have chinese, without any subs, movies/series) and well, i'm not sure where did she buy it, or anything.. but they surely were not in original disk cases... maybe they are kind of the "pirate" version they sell in china and in chinese stores in usa... and i've never heard about that SVCD.. do you know there is a way i can make sure it is a dvd or a svcd? i'm totally lost there :confused:
 
Have you tried another dvd player?
After importing over 800 cd's, I have found 30% of them won't play on my internal player. (the last two songs where wrong) So I've added an LG external player. Now with 2 different players, it works for 99% for all media. The one percent (that didn't play) I found the diameter of the inner hole was too small and or, they were way out of balance.

BTW..Never play a paper labeled CD/DVD in your Super-drive, it's the fastest way to burn up your drive. I learned the hard way.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back