[Hawkeye_a]

Im seriously peeved. Ive had my 20" intel iMac CD since May last year, and its been working great...ive only ever used VLC to play back DVDs and never Apple's DVD player. So a friend came over and put in a DVD and being a Windows user, he opened DVD player with a DVD, and now VLC wont play any other region DVDs... is there anyway around this ?

[macintologist]

If you fail to get any help on this forum you might want to try this forum

The Firmware Page :: View Forum - Macintosh Specific Section

It specializes in these types of issues. So give it a shot.

[Tenex]

If you set SysPref > CD/DVD to ignore when you insert a DVD, VLC should be fine.

VLC is region independent so whatever the Mac DVD player is set to shouldn't affect it, you simply don't want it to auto-run when you insert a DVD.

[Simon]

Tenex, that used to work for me just fine too. Only recently when I wanted to run a region 2 DVD (Chicago) on a region 1 MacBook nothing worked, not even VLC.

[Tenex]

How odd. Which version of VLC are you using? I'm on the latest .8.6 I think and I can play region 1,2,3,4 DVDs without issue on my iMac CD. Perhaps its worth posting the problem in the VLC forums Mac section?

[Simon]

I downloaded the newest Intel version they had - 0.8.6a I think.

I'm wondering if it has to do with either the DVD using some kind of other weird protection or if it depends on the actual DVD drive in your Mac. Your CD iMac and my CD MB might not have the same DVD drive.

I'm leaning toward the DVD being the problem, because I couldn't rip it with MTR either. It reported some kind of strange error.

[vorn]

I , like many others, have been disappointed to find that VLC no longer solves the multi region disk business. My simple workaround to enable me to play all of my collection of region 1 and region 2 DVDs is this. I live region 2 but I set MacOSX DVDplayer to region 1 to play US DVDs. Local region 2 DVDs I play with VLC. This of course doesn't help with my few region 4 DVDs, but saves me getting an external drive or trying to crack the internal drive.

[Veltliner]

I know those region issues.

Instead of trying to play your DVDs on the computer, you could hack your DVD player and remove the region coding.

Someone from this forum gave me the website.

It is:

VideoHelp.com - DVD Player Hack List

[Tenex]

I have a multi-region DVD player but its in another room so I want to play back on the iMac as I spend so much time in front of it...

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by vorn 

I , like many others, have been disappointed to find that VLC no longer solves the multi region disk business. My simple workaround to enable me to play all of my collection of region 1 and region 2 DVDs is this. I live region 2 but I set MacOSX DVDplayer to region 1 to play US DVDs. Local region 2 DVDs I play with VLC. This of course doesn't help with my few region 4 DVDs, but saves me getting an external drive or trying to crack the internal drive.

VLC won't work because the newer Panasonic (matsuSHITa) DVD drives force a reading of the region codes even when the disc is being read in data mode (non movie mode, which is how VLC and ripping programs read the disc.) If the region codes don't match, then it won't read the data.

Pioneer drives don't force a reading of the region code in data mode, so you can use programs like VLC to get around the region restrictions with them.