DVD Region Madness (or fixing the DVD player on a flat panel iMac) | October 29, 2003

I do quite a bit of traveling and when I'm away I often pick up DVD's to watch. I live in a region 2 area (Europe) but it happens that most the the DVD's I own are region 1. On my iMac, when you first play a DVD it asks you to choose a region, and once set, you can only change this region 5 times. Now to me this seems like madness. If I can legally buy DVD's overseas, I really don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to watch them on my iMac. After all I can go down to my local Sony shop and buy a region free DVD player, why can't I do the same on my computer? The whole region things just seems to pointless and arbitrary. If you can buy region free home DVD players from somebody like sony, what's the point in crippling the DVD player on a computer? Wanting to play a region 2 DVD of the Matrix Reloaded tonight, I decided to see if there was something I could do to "fix" my DVD player. I'd heard about "Firmware" patches before, but looking around on the net, it seemed that there weren't any for my flat panel iMac. However I did come across a utility called LG Reset X. It doesn't turn the DVD on my iMac into a region free DVD player. However it does allow you to reset the counter so you can have more than 5 changes, which means that I can now watch all the DVD's I own on my computer, something I feel really feel I should have been able to do anyway. So if you own a flat panel iMac and want to watch DVD's from different regions, LG Reset X may be worth checking out. **[UPDATE 26/3/06] LG Reset X is no longer availible for download, and unfortunatly I deleted my copy a while ago.**

Posted at October 29, 2003 11:41 PM

Comments

Jean Snow said on October 30, 2003 3:30 AM

Thanks for that tip. I live in Japan, and have tons of DVDs from Hong Kong and North America, and so I’ve always found it annoying that I couldn’t all watch them on my Mac (I have a 17” iMac). This program is definitely going to help.

Ryan Parman said on October 30, 2003 6:32 AM

It’s just more RIAA/MPAA-inflicted madness in the world. Personally, I say screw ‘em.

oli said on October 31, 2003 5:11 AM

I’m a New Zealander (region 4) living in Japan (region 2) with an American DVD player (region 1). To say that this system pisses me off is a massive understatement. Thank God for Firmware wizards ;-)

Find the DVDInfo X Utility and check to see what the state of your drive is.
http://www.wormintheapple.gr/macdvd/download.html
Check to make sure that the LG Reset X utility isn’t actually doing vendor resets. You only get 4 vendor resets (a total of 20 changes), so it’d be good to make sure.

kev said on November 11, 2003 8:52 PM

how can i watch american dvd on my panisonic dvd rv32 as i have family in america and they send me dvds i live in england . any help would be great

mduduzi said on December 5, 2003 8:16 AM

hie i live in zimbabwe,i have a flat panel iMac G4 2002 (SuperDrive)PowerMac G4,with a HL-DT-ST vendor i.d,i tried the two LG RESET UTILITIES.I’m really desparate for any help from you guys cos now i’m stuck on region 1,while all somewhat 50 dvds are region 2s.

Tom Arnold said on December 27, 2003 12:31 PM

I use a Microsoft PC, and am currently stuck on region 1 with my LG DVD ROM. I am in region 2 and I jsut wondered if these Apple Mac Firmware programs would still work? I would be grateful if someone could get back to me on this.

James said on January 5, 2004 12:00 AM

Try using a program called VideoLan. On my old DVD drive in my PC I had run out of region changes, yet this program seemed to let me watch whatever DVD’s I wanted. I haven’t used it in a while as I have just got a Mac but it’s worth a try!

http://www.videolan.org/