Sol4 - DVD

DVD Region Madness, The Cure

This page covers the two most common options for curing your DVD-ROM drive of its greatest affliction, mandatory regions codes, which the movie companies forced on us, the long suffering customers, back in January 2000 with the introduction of RPC2.

The available options are to upgrade your drives firmware back to RPC1, and to use one of the relatively new crop of cross platform all region players which do not require any hardware changes. Both have been tested extensively on my hardware, and by a ever growing number of visitors to this site, some of who have reported back.

Now for the bad news. Sorry, but please no more emails asking for help in ripping/copying DVD movies, and yes I know that in most cases you are entitled to make one backup under whats left of your fair use rights. The problem is the movie companies, who treat everyone as a pirate and set the lawyers on anyone they feel like, which is pain and suffering that I can do without. But fear not, all is not lost, as although I cannot directly help, others can, so head for google to see what you can find.

Anyway with that out of the way, its onto the interesting stuff. I start with a brief description of the nature of the problem, then move onto the two options for the cure, then finish up with resources and tools that may help you.

The Region Problem

Until January 1 2000, DVD ROM drives where in RPC1 which was what amounts to unlocked, as in most cases running a region utility program such as remote selector or DVD genie was all it took to bypass the players region settings. All this changed as of January 1, 2000 when the DVD consortium made RPC2 mandatory for all drives from that date. Now RPC2 is a totally different beast, as the region madness is now not only in the player, but also in the drive. This additional protection in the drive, is such that the region can only be changed five times, before its set permanently.

Yes as expected, now that the drives part of the problem, most of the existing player utilities are rendered useless. Well almost, all is not lost, in some cases the change count could be reset, with the use of yet another utility, this while it does work, has its own problem, in that the chip in the drive can only be written to a certain number of times. As for how many times you can reset the change count this way, well I have seen estimates ranging from 100s to 1000s of times, after this, the chip cannot be written and the drive state is unknown, dead, locked forever maybe. OK not a ideal solution, far better is to use a all region player, or if that does not work, upgrade the drives firmware to return it to RPC1.

RCE Disks

RCE disks aka region code enhanced, are the latest attempt by the movie companies to make all zone players useless, and so far these things only seem to be region 1 titles. My understanding on how it works is that it tries to identify the region of the player before playing, some all zone players that do not support manual region changing will fail this test. Now the good news, if you use one of the all region players or after updating your DVD ROM drive, plus using DVD Genie or any other region changer utility that sorts manually setting regions, all should be OK.

The Regions

When DVD was first introduced I tried to figure out the thinking behind how the movie companies chopped up the world into six regions, and only succeeded in almost braking my brain. Now many years later, I still have not real ideas why they did it this way, the best guess so far is that they used the dart board approach, or that the "genius" in question was on mind altering drugs at the time.

As to what they did, well here's the world map that they came up with, now see if you can make any sense of this mess, just be careful as you could brake your brain.

The Cure

The first thing you need to do is find out what your DVD drive is, and if the poor thing is suffering from the madness. The best way to do this for Windoze users, is to use Drive Info which will give you all the info you need. Now before you worry, this program is safe as it does nothing to your drive, it just shows what you need to know, without changing anything.

Now that you have run driveinfo, you need to understand what you are looking at. So starting with the good example.

This screen shot shows that in this case the drive is a "Matsushita DVD-ROM SR-8175", has firmware revision "X228", and has either already been cured of the madness or dates from before January 1, 2000. Which means, as it says, that you have "NO REGION PROTECTION", so can skip the rest of this section, and move onto the tools section to rid your player of the madness.

Now moving onto the not so good example.

This screen shot shows that the drive is a "Liteon DVD-ROM LTD163D", has firmware revision "GHR3", is suffering from the region madness, is set to region 4, has 4 remaining region changes left, and finally the region code is not yet permanent (the region code becomes permanent after 5 changes).

With the vast majority of the drives available, the important information is the drive type, and firmware revision. Some drives that have the region code permanent may need to have this reset with an additional tool before they can be cured. Anyone with info on this please tell me and I will update this page crediting you

So moving on, now that you know that your drive is suffering, you need to decide how to cure it. Now as I mentioned above you no longer have to risk your drive with a firmware upgrade, now you can use one of the cross platform all region players, that simply bypass the drives region codes and let you play what ever regions you want. This second option is the one that everyone is strongly recommended to try as the preferred cure, as it does not effect your hardware, warranty etc.

All Region Player (Try this one first)

This is a relatively recent option that does not involve doing anything to your drive, it works by bypassing the drives region checking. There are several of these players available now, for just about every platform on the planet, and yes I have tested several under both Linux and Apples OSX (Jaguar and Panther), with the best being VLC Media Player, which is a cross platform client for the VideoLAN MPEG2 video streaming solution, that just happens to play DVDs using libdvdcss.

VideoLAN download page (all platforms)

Now I have reports that some of these players are a little choosy about what drives they work with, although so far I have not seen this issue, nor have I reports of any drives that VLC does not play nice with. That said if you have problems, or just want to report success please tell me and I will add you to the list.

One final word of warning, and yes its the expected down side 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 down side, I still strongly recommend you try VLC or one of the other players before even thinking about flashing your drives firmware, as these players do not change hardware, so leaving your warranty intact, plus there is no risk of killing your drive.

NOTE: From personal experience I can confirm that VLC works well under Linux and even under Apple OSX (Jaguar and Panther) on my Powerbook with its Superdrive. Anyway could not resist the temptation to include the expected screen capture, so here it is, VLC playing Region 2 Farscape on my Region 4 Powerbook, with the second shot being taken from "Star Trek Nemesis" in 16:9 wide screen format.

Firmware Upgrade

At the risk of repeating myself, if you upgrade the firmware you will void your warranty, may be in violation of the super scary DMCA in the US and continue at your own risk

Now that you understand that (you do right!), we can move on. The firmware option will update your drive so that its free of the madness (goes back to RPC1).

Another word of warning, you need to make sure that the firmware you choose to install matches your drive and existing firmware revision, otherwise you are at a risk of damaging your drive. As for actually finding the firmware for your drive, well here are links to some of the better sites for you to try.

	The Firmware Page [rpc1.org]
	Herries NEC Firmware Page [rpc1.org]
	Pioneer Firmware Page [rpc1.org]
	Toshiba Firmware Page [cracks.ru]
	Neos Toshiba Firmware Page [geocities.com]
	The Firmware Page [club-internet.fr]
	Mac Firmware Patches [wormintheapple.gr]

Now that you have the right firmware for your drive, you need to read the doco thats usually part of the download for instructions on how to install it. Sorry folks but there are so many different patches out there that I cannot possibly document them all here.

One last time I repeat myself, YOU DO THIS UPGRADE AT YOUR OWN RISK, I CANNOT HELP YOU NOR WILL ANYONE ELSE.

Tools

At this point your drive has been cured of the madness, but your player is still unwell. To finish the job and cure your player, you need to use one of several region switching tools. There are many of these things, with the best ones being.

DVD Genie. This is the best choice if you have one of the many software players such as; Cinemaster, PowerDVD, WinDVD or one of the players supplied by a video card vendor such as Matrox or ATI. Download it from inmatrix.com.

Remote Selector. If you are using one of the hardware decoder cards such as the creative DXR2, DXR3 or Hollywood cards you will need to use this tool to deal with the regions, as DVD Genie does not support these cards. You can download it from visualdomain.net.