Comments on: Region Locked DVDs and Mac Book Pro

By: Miz Esther

Miz Esther — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:03:55 +0000

Yeah, I agree the whole idea of “Region” dvds is utterly stupid; what Brain Donor came up with that idea? What good is it doing? I truly do not get it.

What I am wondering, though, is if I brought my laptop TO India, from California, for instance, would my laptop then *think* it was in California, or India?
In other words, is it the computer or the DVD that is making these decisions? I am a total newbie to most of this, but had recently heard of the regional nonsense, and really don’t get it.

For example, I heard that the movie Eyes Wide Shut was sort of censored in USA (WE DONT BELIEVE IN CENSORSHIP HERE!!!)…that the Euro or UK version had the director’s cut, full version as the director envisioned the movie, which is how movies should be viewed, imho. But then I found out I would not be able to play it in my home, due to this stupid region craziness. Isn’t that censorship?

Not to set off something else, here, but I also heard (feel free to correct me, anyone) that DVDs actually expire, and eventually won’t play at all on players that once showed them. Is that true? PLEASE say no! I have forty-’leven movies still in the packaging!!

Thanks, anyone/everyone =^D

By: Chris Stevenson

Chris Stevenson — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:51:32 +0000

I use Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr/) to rip my DVDs to my hard drive. I agree with you that region locked media is insanely stupid. I am an Australian who has lived in every single one of the 4 regions in the last 4 years. So what, I am supposed to buy 4 laptops? Stupid.

By: josh

josh — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:38:47 +0000

can you rip dvd’s encoded for any region? If so just rip them. If not ask a friend with a pc if you can borrow it long enough to rip your dvds. You can then play the rip anywhere.

As an extra measure to protect others from this same terrible fate you could upload those rips to the internet via bittorrent.

By: Sachin

Sachin — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:59:06 +0000

@ketan

Well just launching VLC doesn’t work in UJ-867 drive. VLC can bypass the region check if only the drive permits it. When drive is sending data it returns them as bad sectors hence, VLC can’t read data at all.

This trick works with drives which are not of range UJ-8xx.

By: Ketan Padegaonkar

Ketan Padegaonkar — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:34:16 +0000

Under system preferences in the cd/dvd option change all the options to not run any cd/dvd software.

Then just launch VLC and open the cd/dvd.