UPDATE 2006.09.18: It would seem that Matsushita has revised their firmware such that VLC is no longer a working solution on recently built ‘Books. When I had my MacBook, I had VLC installed, but I actually preferred method two, which I will describe next. VLC is not, however, a full-featured or particularly slick DVD player. Many people like VLC, and it’s the simplest solution to the problem. When you insert a DVD movie, it will simply mount on the desktop like any data disk would, and then you can manually launch VLC if your movie is from a foreign region.įor home region movies (US is region 1) you can still use DVD player, but the program will no longer launch automatically. The key to using VLC is to go into the system preferences CD/DVD pane and and deselect DVD Player as the default application for DVD movies. VLC performs even better on an Intel Mac than it does on PowerPC, and just like on PowerPC, it doesn’t care about the region counter in OS X or whether your drive matches the disc you are trying to play. The first option is the same one I had recommended for PowerPC laptop owners who didn’t want to replace their drive, and that is to use VLC. So what do you do if you don’t want to flash firmware, or, worse yet, you’re using a portable for which there are no flashable drives available? ( MacBook and MacBook Pro computers use 9.5mm drives, which at this point are only made by Matsushita, and thus are not upgradable.) You have two options – and while both work, neither are particularly elegant. In fact, if all you want is multiregion playback, you can hit eBay with $10 and buy an old 1x or 2x DVD-ROM drive from 1996 or so that is RPC1 by default, as all region coding was handled in software at that time. The Mac Pro is even easier to modify, and with its extra optical drive bay, there are many options for those who don’t want to update firmware or replace what Apple supplied. The Intel Mac mini and iMac both use standard-sized drives, and while the Matsushita drives that Apple likes to supply are not flashable, Pioneer drives and others (check for your specific drive) can be flashed from RPC2 to RPC1 – region free. Those same solutions are all available with desktop Macs, and there is even a Universal Binary version of Region X, though the PowerPC version works fine under Rosetta.
In the original article, I went over drive replacements and a utility, Region X, to reset the region counter in OS X, as well as a software alternative called VLC. Much has changed with the introduction of Intel Macs, enough that an update is in order. 2006 – A while back, I wrote an article about making your Mac’s DVD player region free.
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