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DISCLAIMER: Before you continue, you need to understand a few things. First everything you do is entirely at your own risk, you take the risk of killing your drive with a firmware upgrade, or at the very least voiding your warranty. I cannot help you, and its very unlikely that anyone else will, beyond selling you a new drive. If thats not bad enough you are more than likely in violation of the super scary, and truly evil DMCA in the US. Finally, this document is provided as is, there is no warranty of any kind. All I will say is it worked on my hardware, and that of those who reported back.
Region Madness, The Mac Cure
After receiving many requests, and finally getting a Mac myself, I have finally found the time to write a Mac only version of the popular DVD Region Madness, The Cure page.
Before I went Mac various people tried to tell me that playing all DVD regions on a Mac was not something to be undertaken lightly, given the lack of firmware patches for the newer drives, and the reliance on Apples DVD player.
Well, after a short investigation I found that its actually just as simple as it is under Linux. First you don't need a firmware patch, second you don't need any region changer utilities, thirdly you get to keep your warranty.
The options available are just the same as for other platforms, you can either patch your firmware, or run one of the newer all region players that just bypass the region junk on the drive. The second one is the primary focus of this page, with the firmware patch option not really covered, but for those interested have a look at this page at the Mac DVD Resource for more information. Remember I said above "you don't need a firmware patch" as the software players are now mature enough to make the region setting in the drive meaningless.
before moving onto the interesting stuff, for those who are interested in some background on the nature of the region madness, have a look at my other page which may not be about Macs, but does talk about the problem in some detail
The players
There are a number of players that can be made to run under OSX, all have their good and bad points. For example Xine which I use under Linux on some systems, is not available as a native OSX App (if you know different let me know and I will update this page), still others are command line only and need building from source, then comes VLC which is now my preferred OSX player, and is coming close to replacing Xine under Linux.
VLC is part of the excellent Video Lan streaming video solution, and stands out from the others, as not only is its video quality stunning, but its also open sourced, GPL licensed, and cross platform, being available for just about every platform known to man, including native OSX.
One final word of warning, and yes its the expected downside of using one of these players, which is that they do use more CPU than others, as most are pure software decoders, unable to take advantage of hardware acceleration. Now this may sound bad, but no real need to worry, as from personal experience, I can confirm that they are getting better with each release, and in the case of VLC its currently within around 5% of the CPU usage of the Apple player on my Powerbook.
Even with this downside, this is still my preferred solution to the region madness sickness on the Mac and just about every other platform, and as such you are strongly recommend you try VLC or one of the other players before even thinking about flashing your drives firmware. Just think about it these players do not change hardware, so your warranty is unharmed, plus you have no risk of killing your drive with a bad firmware load.
Ok so it sounds interesting, but whats it like, well starting with the obligatory screen shot, then moving onto the full in-depth review.
If you want another screen shot, just look at this one. Anyway, that out of the way, here are the download links, plus a few others that may interest for VLC, and general Mac DVD.
Links and Related Pages
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