Apple DVD-region unlocking?

Hey, so WWDC is tomorrow (today now, I guess)! I wonder what Steve will announce...

So is there a solution for the new MacBook Pros to unlock their DVD drives to be region-unlocked? I know that Apple and Matshita (Matsushita) are a bunch of Matsush*t-heads for not allowing the new Intel Macs to be like their PC brethren, IE, not unlockable. As far as I know, all of the old firmware hackers are out of business. I was wondering if there was a solution that I missed?

 

VLC will play anything irregardless no?

 

Nope. Sucks, really. I can't get it to work.

 

Not a whole lot of options if you can't get VLC working unfortunately. There's no OS X equivalent of AnyDVD as far as I'm aware.

 

It's not that VLC doesn't work on my computer - it just works exactly like Apple DVD Player, in that it uses up one of the 5 hardware region changes. Someone used to write new firmware for the Matshita drives, but I was hoping there was a software solution...

 

I am also curious about this.

I have read that if you get an external DVD drive, you can set that to a different region then the internal one. A poor work around at best, but can anyone confirm this?

 

Yup, that'd work. Crude though.

Surely someone out there has written a custom firmware without region encoding?

 

You can use MacTheRipper to first rip, then play. I don't know of a firmware hack.

 

might not work on leopard (i'm on tiger) but if you play a dvd thru vlc, it'll ask for a region change. don't choose one. you should still be able to watch the video. when you've finished, don't make any changes on the region settings (ie. click cancel) and you'll be back where you started

 

Ever since the start of the PPC G5 era, unlocking your SuperDrives has become basically impossible. I unlocked a Pioneer 106D in my revision A G5, but my revision B model came with the 109D, which never got hacked. Needless to say, the Optiarc drives in the current Mac Pro are just as stuck. As for the laptops, same deal.

As suggested, external drives on different region codes. In my Mac Pro my top drive is Region 2, and the bottom is Region 1.

 

i hate region locking but its something we need to put up with i geuss.

yeah as said above if you can't get VLC to play it then the other option is to use the very crude method of an external dvd with the region changed on it... other than that i think you're stuck!