- #EXTERNAL REGION FREE DVD PLAYER FOR MAC MOVIE#
- #EXTERNAL REGION FREE DVD PLAYER FOR MAC UPDATE#
- #EXTERNAL REGION FREE DVD PLAYER FOR MAC PRO#
- #EXTERNAL REGION FREE DVD PLAYER FOR MAC WINDOWS#
My Mac Pro has two DVD±RW drives, the upper drive that it came with being region coded for RPC 2 and the lower one, a 4-year-old Pioneer that I had flashed to RPC 1 and pulled from my Power Mac G4 before selling that machine. What is important to know, however, is that the OS region counter is connected to each DVD drive, meaning that if your computer has two DVD drives, their region changes will be counted separately.
#EXTERNAL REGION FREE DVD PLAYER FOR MAC UPDATE#
The lock in the drive itself may be unlocked with a firmware update or reinstall, if such a thing exists, or you may just be out of luck.įlashing your firmware to RPC 1, or region free, completely takes away the locking on the hardware side, and you then only have to worry about the region code in the OS, which, as described above, is very easily defeated. I put the word locked in quotes because both locks can be undone by the manufacturer, and the OS lock can easily be undone using the Region X utility for OS X or one of many similar utilities for Windows. These settings can be changed a total of 4 or 5 times and are then “locked”.
#EXTERNAL REGION FREE DVD PLAYER FOR MAC WINDOWS#
Both the drive hardware and the OS, whether Windows or OS X, check the region of every DVD inserted.
#EXTERNAL REGION FREE DVD PLAYER FOR MAC MOVIE#
Flash Your Firmwareįirst and foremost, the easiest way to watch a DVD movie on your Mac is to buy or rent that movie in the same region as your drive.
In the UK, for instance, you would be in Region 2, while South Korea, which represents about 20% of my DVD collection, is Region 3. While this article assumes you live in the United States or Canada and have your DVD drive set to Region 1, the principals and solutions are the same regardless of your actual location and home DVD region. So with no further ado, here is a look at region coding and the Mac platform at the tail end of 2008. Here is a quick summary of ways to get around region coding, followed by some information on the prospects for newer Macs and my current preferred method that works well, provided you have the time and hard drive space. Also unchanged are the alternatives that may work for viewing foreign region DVDs on your out-of-region or region-locked Mac. In addition to a region-free drive, you still need the Region X utility, recently upgraded to version 1.6 and fully OS X 10.5 Leopard compatible for both PowerPC and Intel to reset OS X’s region change counter, which is separate from the region setting in your drive’s firmware.
As always, the Mac specific section of remains the place to go to search for region-free firmware and flash utilities to make your Mac region-free. The Problemįirst off, the basics of the problem of watching DVDs from multiple regions on any computer, Mac or PC, remain the same, and the information in the previous articles remains valid, especially if you own an older Mac or a desktop tower that allows for the easy replacement of your optical drive.
As it’s been well over a year since my last look at the subject and the tools available to Mac users have changed a bit, I thought it was time for a brief update. 2008 – I’ve written on this topic a few times before, and those articles continue to draw extremely high hit-counts despite the constant advance of technology.
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