"High Noonn" DVD??

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 05:23:23PM +0100, Nikola Le??i?? wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:46:00 +0100
> Roland Smith <rsmith at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> 
> > OK, that's nice to know. All the DVDs that I have play fine with
> > mplayer, but they're probably all region 2 disks. So I should be able
> > to play region 1 disks with mplayer?
> 
> That's exactly what I am trying to do at this moment, with no success.
> I'm in the region 2 and I set my DVD drive accordingly (with a small C
> programme). Now I got some region 1 DVDs and libdvdcss is not sufficient
> as such. Of course, I can change DVD drive region setting temporarily,
> but the drive allows just 4 or 5 such changes. Does anyone know how to
> avoid this counting?

Changing the region encoding setting on your DVD drive involves setting
a bit or code somewhere in the flash/EEPROM inside of the DVD drive.
The limit of 4-5 changes is purely a DVD drive firmware thing; there's
no technical limit, instead it's a limit imposed by the firmware.

There are websites nowadays which offer "hacked" firmwares which remove
region encoding altogether (or remove the 4-5 set limit).  However,
they're only available for very specific models of DVD drives.  If this
is important to you, you should considering purchasing a drive that can
be flashed with a "hacked" firmware.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |