i was looking to order the japanese toy story dvd and i originally figured that even if it won't play on my dvd player, it will atleast play in my computer. after some research i saw that this might actually not be true. i have a macbook pro. is the only way to watch a japanese dvd with a multi-region dvd player? if this is the case, do you know of any way to "obtain" some japanese disney movies?

There are programs that will make your computer's DVD ROM act like a multi-region drive, but I don't know of any for the Mac.

Does this article
help? The key there is using a different player called VLC. It doesn't honour region codes.

actually i read through that when i was trying to figure things out and apparently methods like that, that bypass the initial restrictions might harm the drive or void the warranty. not sure if that's true or not but i'd be wary to try it. thanks for the link though

Don't know all the technical terms but with my PowerBook even though VLC will play any region DVDs, the drive itself restricts the DVDs that you can play, by region. PowerBooks you can change the region of the drive 3 times then it is locked to whatever region you choose on the third change.

You can get round this by changing the drive's firmware. When I first tried to do this a couple of years ago, no one had yet written a version for the drive I had. Also reading the FAQs on doing this, it seemed that it was possible to f&%k up your drive if you didn't do things right.

Ordering from places like YesAsia might work as lots of their DVDs are region 0 which should be okay on your computer.

Yeah, I'm not sure how stubborn Mac DVD drives are... I don't use one. But VLC has worked flawlessly for my Windows and Linux boxes using a variety of drives. I'd take a guess that the general functionality of Mac drives is identical to those of PC drives but I can understand if you're hesitant.

Another option is to buy a DVD player (not a PC drive) from Australia. Region encoding was ruled unlawful in court and all DVD players here will play all discs regardless of region. You might need an adapter for the power cable though...

thanks for all the quick responses shopping for fun japanese stuff is such a good way to procrastinate studying for my quiz tomorrow morning.

i completely forgot about yesasia. i stumbled upon it a week ago and forgot about it for ordering japanese things. i looked for any dvds i could find that were region free and was unsuccessful.

i guess i'll just have to look into getting a region free dvd player once i have some more money saved up. the problem is that i just bought a dvd player so i'm somewhat reluctant to buy another haha.

thanks again for the quick replies!

From what I gather you do need to change the firmware of your hardware even when using VLc (at least on a Mac in my experience, but I could be wrong). I haven't done it, but the one page I would check if I wanted to try would be this one:
<http://www.powerbook-fr.com/dossiers/dvd_region_free_en_article30.html>
There is always a risk involved in chaging the firmware.

You could also try with MacTheRipper to see if it can copy the DVD on your hard drive and then use VLC.

I'm using a PowerMac and or iBook. What I've done in the past was to use handbrake. Set the Mac to not automatically read and start the movie upon insertion of the DVD. Then use handbrake to rip the movie to an mpeg4 file. You can then watch the video in quicktime or VLC. It takes a lot of space and defeats the purpose of the DVD but you don't have to worry with the region stuff and you have a file you can rip audio from if you like.

On PC, I know of a program called DVDRegionFree + CSS. Doesn't require tampering with the firmware and users can watch DVDs in Windows Media Player, InterVideo WinDVD, or (I imagine) any other major DVD software.

Surely, there must be something similar for Macs.

guppy Wrote:I'm using a PowerMac and or iBook. What I've done in the past was to use handbrake. Set the Mac to not automatically read and start the movie upon insertion of the DVD. Then use handbrake to rip the movie to an mpeg4 file. You can then watch the video in quicktime or VLC. It takes a lot of space and defeats the purpose of the DVD but you don't have to worry with the region stuff and you have a file you can rip audio from if you like.

I have had problems trying to rip other region DVDs with handbrake without changing the region setting on my mac.. Are you sure this is possible?

Anyways, the advice that I have read on the internet (I havent actually done this), but people say to buy an OLD USB dvd player on ebay made before the region crap was implemented...

skylarth,
I've been doing this for about 1.5-2 years now. Before I had a Japanese DVD player, I would rent movies from Tsutaya (the Japanese Blockbuster, if you will) and rip them with handbrake, watch them, then delete them. The key is to open it with handbrake before the DVD player says to the Mac, "Hey this is the wrong region." That's why I suggested setting the Mac to not automatically open DVD player upon insertion of a DVD. That's the default setting.
If you're having problems, (and handbrake being the culprit) I'll have to dig a little deeper and see why I can get it to work and you can't. I know that I'm not using the newest version of handbrake and strictly PPC Macs. Don't think that would matter, but you never know.
I'm busy with random commitments this week, though, I can't get to this until the weekend. I would like to try to figure out this though, just to satisfy my own curiosity.
Oh, an expensive solution ,which I've done, is to use MacTheRipper (to remove the region code) and burn with Toast Titanium 8 (or I think Popcorn-it's like half price, but I've never used it).

actually, the PPC thing might be the problem .. i remember reading about it somewhere, but i have an intel mac, and something about the specific dvd player that is in the macbooks, i dont think it works yet with handbrake without changing the region code.. (i guess its good motivation for me to watch only japanese movies).. but at school my library has basically every dvd ever made, so im pretty sure they will have some japanese movies.. but it would be nice to figure out the region codes.

yeah, mac the ripper works great too, sometimes i have had to rip with mac the ripper and then reincode with handbrake.. that worked once. but i still have only like 2 more region changes left.

ugh. region codes are so ridiculous and i wish they were illegal

JimmySeal Wrote:On PC, I know of a program called DVDRegionFree + CSS. Doesn't require tampering with the firmware and users can watch DVDs in Windows Media Player, InterVideo WinDVD, or (I imagine) any other major DVD software.

I down loaded this, and it worked fine for me (PC though). I liked it so much I wanted to buy it. But the page continually said "our payment page is currently down...check back soon". Finally, the 90-day free trial period expired. That was when I switched to the free "VideoLAN" aka VLC player.

guppy Wrote:I've been doing this for about 1.5-2 years now. Before I had a Japanese DVD player, I would rent movies from Tsutaya (the Japanese Blockbuster, if you will) and rip them with handbrake, watch them, then delete them. The key is to open it with handbrake before the DVD player says to the Mac, "Hey this is the wrong region." That's why I suggested setting the Mac to not automatically open DVD player upon insertion of a DVD. That's the default setting.

Never used Handbreak myself, but assuming it's like MacTheRipper, you still have the region problem if you want to rip DVDs from a different region than your drive is set to.

guppy it looks like you're always ripping region 2 DVDs (so obviously your drive will be set to region 2). But if you tried to rip an American DVD you would come across the problem that some of us have had.

Doh!
Interesting point synewave. I do remember pulling it off with my "from US" iBook- default region 1, however, I usually use my PowerMac (G5), which was bought here in Japan. So, you are correct, it is probably set to region 2. I'm interested in trying to see if it is possible, or I'm making up a story. So, I'll do some operational testing this weekend and report back.
MacTheRipper and Handbreak are a bit different. Handbreak actually converts the movie to a video file (.avi, .mpeg4 etc.) but as far as I can tell MacTheRipper just removes the encryption. At least that's what I use it for. I'm pretty new to it. Like I mentioned, I use MacTheRipper combined with Toast...

guppy any light you can shed on this irritating subject would be appreciated.

Incidentally I have noticed that occasionally even when DVDs play fine on my PowerBook, MacTheRipper doesn't recognise the disc hence you can't back up your own DVDs!

skylarth Wrote:i remember reading about it somewhere, but i have an intel mac, and something about the specific dvd player that is in the macbooks, i dont think it works yet with handbrake without changing the region code..

There appears to be a newer generation of DVD drives floating around called RPC2. They still read DVD's and all that, but instead of the Operating System / Media Player doing the region checking, the drive does it. Unless the DVD's region matches the drive's region (which can only be changed X times), the drive will not read the disc no matter what.

A couple of random articles suggest that Macs have been using RPC2 drives for a while now.

Perhaps an external DVD drive (firewire / USB) that isn't so tight may be another option?

aircawn Wrote:Perhaps an external DVD drive (firewire / USB) that isn't so tight may be another option?

yeah, i have thought about it, but i just dont really have the motivation to go and get one.. ill probabbly just leave mine in region 2 or whatever japan is, for now, as kind of an encouragement to watch less english movies.. (being at college, i can watch plenty of movies on other people's computers anyways)..

anyways, while we are on the topic of japanese movies.. if (in theory) someone would want to download japanese movies (theoretically), they might want to search for avistaz for a (theoretically) pretty good torrents. (no region code mess )

aircawn Wrote:

skylarth Wrote:i remember reading about it somewhere, but i have an intel mac, and something about the specific dvd player that is in the macbooks, i dont think it works yet with handbrake without changing the region code..

There appears to be a newer generation of DVD drives floating around called RPC2. They still read DVD's and all that, but instead of the Operating System / Media Player doing the region checking, the drive does it. Unless the DVD's region matches the drive's region (which can only be changed X times), the drive will not read the disc no matter what.

While it is true that it is the drive that does the checking, it is still in software - or rather, firmware. Most common drives have hacked firmwares you can flash to the drive to disable region checking. Still others have tricks whereby you can reset the region changing counter.

You can always rip the DVD to harddrive and then watch it from there as well...

Jarvik7 Wrote:

aircawn Wrote:

skylarth Wrote:i remember reading about it somewhere, but i have an intel mac, and something about the specific dvd player that is in the macbooks, i dont think it works yet with handbrake without changing the region code..

There appears to be a newer generation of DVD drives floating around called RPC2. They still read DVD's and all that, but instead of the Operating System / Media Player doing the region checking, the drive does it. Unless the DVD's region matches the drive's region (which can only be changed X times), the drive will not read the disc no matter what.

While it is true that it is the drive that does the checking, it is still in software - or rather, firmware. Most common drives have hacked firmwares you can flash to the drive to disable region checking. Still others have tricks whereby you can reset the region changing counter.

You can always rip the DVD to harddrive and then watch it from there as well...

im pretty sure that aircawn is right.. i think there is something in the macbook dvd drives that limits the region usage above and beyond any software limiting.. that said, if you have any advice on software to try, that would be great.. i think im down to like 2 switches left.