[Slrman]

I have a 2.66 GHz iMac (early 2008, it says) and live in Brazil. I have a few DVD movies and a friend brought a new one to see last night. I had to change my region from 1 to 4 so we cold see it, but this is limited to 4 more times, so I really would like a software fix to allow me to set to region 0 or to intercept the file before it even asks for that.

I've tried setting the preference opening VLC, but VLC (v1.03) doesn't play the movie.

My drive is:
MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-875:

Firmware Revision: DB09
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipping Drive)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -R DL, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, DVD-DAO

Anyone of of a fix for this drive? The older thread on this here didn't address this drive. IN any case, the thread was too old to permit more posts. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

[turtle777]

Other than getting a cracked firmware and installing it on your drive, there is no "software only" solution to keep changing the region code.

VLC should work though. But you have to manually open the disc from the VLC menu.

-t

[Simon]

These guys say a region-free firmware for the Matshita UJ-875 isn't out yet.
MacBook-fr - DVD : Region Free (EN)

Another source I like to check is this one (but they're down right now so can't check).
http://forum.rpc1.org/portal.php

[Slrman]

First, thanks for the replies. I appreciate it.

Turtle777, VLC does not recognize that there is anything in the drive. In fact, when I load the DVD in the drive, it doesn't even show up in Finder. To eject it, I have to open up the Drive utility and eject it from there. Or maybe I have a more serious problem?

[Eug]

XVI no longer does Mac RPC-1 cracks AFAIK. Because of that, getting Mac based cracks seems less frequent these days. One way around it though is just to boot Windows... but that is only if the Windows crack is available.

That's why I keep an external FW drive around for my iMac. I got a drive that I flashed to RPC-1 on Windows. This drive is region free and also will set the DVD+R bit to emulate DVD-ROM, to maximize read compatibility. (Very old DVD drives and players cannot read discs flagged as DVD+R, but will read them if you set the bit to the DVD-ROM flag.)

Also, flashing the drive firmware voids the drive warranty (and I always have a 3 year warranty). The external FW drive solves the iMac drive warranty issue. And if you believe this sort of thing, having an external drive relieves the wear-and-tear on the internal non-removable drive. Plus the external desktop drives are much faster too.

You can get an external USB 2 drive for the price of the OEM DVD drive (US$35) plus US$25 for the enclosure.

[amazing]

I second the suggestion to get a flashable external optical disk drive. Best solution.

[P]

Matsushita applies the region code when reading data discs as well, which is why VLC region code circumvention doesn't work.

If you only need region 1 and 4, just get the cheapest external drive you can find and leave one set to region 1 and the other to region 4. Then use VLC to play all DVDs.

[Simon]

Thirded. Especially if you have a Mac with a slot-loader. Slot-loaders suck. My external USB2 DVD burner on the other hand was dirt cheap, runs fast and is more reliable than any other optical drive I've ever had.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Simon 

Thirded. Especially if you have a Mac with a slot-loader. Slot-loaders suck.

The truth.

Those slot-loadetrs crap out after about two years.
My Mac mini's is on it's way out, my Mom's iBook drive is dead, and my iMac's drive just died.

I don't know why Apple can't use some quality drives.

-t

[Simon]

Unfortunately I have seen three of those slot-loaders crap out far earlier than after two years. Two on a 15" MBP and one of a 13" MB. My personal record so far is five months on a brand new factory sealed 15" MBP.

AFAIC Apple can get rid of the optical drive in the MBP entirely. I can't wait until I can buy a smaller/thinner/lighter MBP w/o the optical, or otherwise a MBP with exactly the same size, but twice the battery life thanks to the extra space from removing the optical. I think there is hardly another feature I use less on my MBP than the optical drive. And yet it's about the largest component after the display.

[P]

Much better idea: Pull the optical and put an SSD in its place. Or two.

And to offer a dissenting opinion: The slotloaders in both my older iMacs have seen heavy use over five years each, and neither has failed. At least back then, the reliability was fine - it may have dropped since the Intel transition.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by P 

Much better idea: Pull the optical and put an SSD in its place. Or two.

Yes, once Blockbuster, Netflix and my local library start offering DVDs on SSD

-t

[Wiskedjak]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

I don't know why Apple can't use some quality drives.

Built-in obsolescence.

or, what do you do when the drive dies? Grumble and complain, sure, but most Mac users will end up buying another Mac.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Wiskedjak 

Built-in obsolescence.

or, what do you do when the drive dies? Grumble and complain, sure, but most Mac users will end up buying another Mac.

I'm getting it replaced, paid for by Amex, since it's covered by Amex' extended warranty.

-t

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Wiskedjak 

Built-in obsolescence.

or, what do you do when the drive dies? Grumble and complain, sure, but most Mac users will end up buying another Mac.

More likely the result of Apple buying in huge quantities; while the overall failure rate is fairly low, the incidence or failures (total number of failures) goes up when the quantity of units goes up.

Maybe they do think about "the user will just buy a new Mac" in Cupertino, but that is not very likely to be the reason for the failures we see.

[P]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Yes, once Blockbuster, Netflix and my local library start offering DVDs on SSD

-t

You'd have to combine it with an external DVD, obviously.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by P 

You'd have to combine it with an external DVD, obviously.

But that'd be stupid.

I don't want an all-in-one computer (iMac), just to have to add external DVD drives.

Just so I can have an SSDs in my desktop computer ? Seriously ?

-t

[Veltliner]

Don't get hung up on the hardware.

Focus on the software.

Use VLC for playing back your DVDs.

VLC doesn't have the regional code limitations.

I had the same problem, and couldn't play my gift DVDs from Europe.

With VLC I could.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Veltliner 

Don't get hung up on the hardware. Focus on the software.

Use VLC for playing back your DVDs. VLC doesn't have the regional code limitations.

Apparently, it's not that easy:

Originally Posted by P 

Matsushita applies the region code when reading data discs as well, which is why VLC region code circumvention doesn't work.

See also here: http://www.interrupt19.com/2008/10/0...code-nonsense/

I know what you suggest works with Optiarc drives.

-t

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Veltliner 

Don't get hung up on the hardware.
..
VLC doesn't have the regional code limitations.

Read the thread. Matshita drives (which many Macs come with) don't allow VLC to circumvent the region coding of the drive.

[Edit: turtle just beat me to it]

[P]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

But that'd be stupid.

I don't want an all-in-one computer (iMac), just to have to add external DVD drives.

Just so I can have an SSDs in my desktop computer ? Seriously ?

-t

You don't HAVE to - you can pull the main HD and fit at least one SSD, a regular 2.5" HD and a SATA port multiplier in the space, if you like - but the context of the discussion was that slotloaders suck and how they all break (which I disagree with, but no matter). My point was that should the DVD in this iMac break, I'll put an SSD in there and use an external DVD rather than attempt to fit a slotloader that fits.

And about region codes - I know everyone has explained this already, but basically it works like this: To read a physical DVD, you need to license some patents regarding the storage of information on it - nothing onerous. To read a DVD movie, you need a CSS license, which grants you a key code that you need for decoding the movie on it. This license specifes that the player must do all the things that are wrong with DVDs, like not being able to skip annoying warnings, being forced to obey region codes, etc. Also, you have to pay $1000,000 for the pleasure of doing so, to cut down on that nasty competition in the market.

Usually when a movie is played on a computer, the playing app basically tells the DVD player that it wants to play a movie. The DVD-player then checks the region code, and if it matches, it passes the data on to the player. The player then usually matches the region code again and then starts playing. What VLC does is that it accesses the DVD as if it were a data disc, meaning that there is no requirement on the player to check for a region code. Doing this (accessing a video disc as if it were data is a violation of the CSS license, but VLC never took out any such license, and is not bound by it. Note that this is not illegal - yet, I guess I should say - but the studios obviously don't like it.

Panasonic/Matsushita has for several years enforced the region code checking on data discs as well. Why they do so, I don't know. Unless the CSS license has been modified, they're not required to. Perhaps they're just brown-nosing, perhaps there is some other division of the same congolomerate that makes movies and likes it that way - I don't know. This presents no problem to regular DVD-ROM discs, because they don't have region codes in any case. It does break VLC's circumvention trick, unless you load your own firmware onto the drive.

[Eug]

Panasonic/Matsushita has for several years enforced the region code checking on data discs as well. Why they do so, I don't know. Unless the CSS license has been modified, they're not required to. Perhaps they're just brown-nosing, perhaps there is some other division of the same congolomerate that makes movies and likes it that way - I don't know.

Panasonic gets royalties from DVD, as it is a major patent holder.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by P 

My point was that should the DVD in this iMac break, I'll put an SSD in there and use an external DVD rather than attempt to fit a slotloader that fits.

But WHY ?

People put SSDs in their laptops to make it more lightweight and save on battery.
Forget about speed, current SSDs are NOT faster than a speedy 3.5" HD.

So, again, WHY would you put a SSD into your desktop ?

-t

[P]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

But WHY ?

People put SSDs in their laptops to make it more lightweight and save on battery.
Forget about speed, current SSDs are NOT faster than a speedy 3.5" HD.

So, again, WHY would you put a SSD into your desktop ?

-t

They ARE faster. That Velociraptor they're being comapred to is the fastest regular drive out there. There are issues with them not keeping that speed over time, hence the discussion of TRIM, but if you look at seektime, they are significantly faster and that translates into better real world performance.

That some early models were much worse - especially those based on the infamous Jmicron controller - is a different story. If you pick something like the Intel drives, they're incredibly fast compared to a regular HD.

[ghporter]

Isn't the Velociraptor a notable exception in SSDs? Turtle's statement isn't off the wall; most SSDs don't outperform hard drives and many don't equal them. The whole reason they called this newer SSD "Velociraptor" is that it's faster than the rest of the herd...

[Cold Warrior]

velociraptor is a traditional HDD. The bars there on that first page are it going much slower than everything else listed -- all SSDs.

[amazing]

The iMac has a gorgeous screen, great for movies--so it still needs an optical drive, no way around that, unless you never watch movies--or you buy them from iTunes. Even to rip movies or music to your HD, you need an optical drive.

Optical drives come in handy even on laptops: I was just with my son and my 14-month old granddaughter, who was developing some food pickiness. They went out and rented a kid's DVD and played it on the MBP to distract her so that she'd eat without spit-ups and ear-splitting drama. Is it good to train American kids that they need to watch movies while they're eating? No. Is it good for family dynamics that she's eating without huge drama? Majorly!

If I were going on a road trip with kids, I'd even be tempted to box up something like an iMac and haul games and movies along, just for harmony in the hotel rooms--or at gramma's.

[P]

Yes, Velociraptor is the successor to the traditional Raptor - a special HDD that sacrifices storage capacity for extreme seek performance. Not even that can match modern SSDs - in fact, it doesn't get close. The win would be even bigger if SATA itself didn't limit performance. Intel is supposedly working on a new interface for flash-based storage, but that's some time off yet. Note sure why they don't simply use one PCIe channel for each SSD and fix the rest with drivers on the software side. I know there are RAM disks that work like that.

[ghporter]

Boy, I really goofed up on that one.

The biggest problem I have with SSDs is actually not that they don't have (affordable) high capacity units. It's that being flash-based, they have a lifespan problem. Only so many toggles of each cell and that cell dies, which means either you lose data, or your capacity starts to evaporate at some point in the future. Have the makers gotten better at this, producing longer life units? Or are they still just flash memory that dies an early death (at least compared to hard drives)?

[Spheric Harlot]

Flash rewrite capability has advanced considerably in the past few years.

Also, they're controlling distribution of the cells to pretty much guarantee a lifespan far beyond what hard drives live for.

Having said that, I'm not trusting them until this 500 GB Momentus is up for replacement in two years or so. Until about then, I'm not recommending them, either.

[P]

I don't think SSDs will replace HDs, I think they will complement them. Their big advantage is in random reads, nothing else. Sequential reads are also faster, but then HDs are plenty fast as well, so no big deal. Writes are still slower. That is no big deal for random real-world writes, because the cache hides that, but there are situations where it shows. Say that you put your OS and apps on an SSD and all your documents on a regular HD. Fast access to the files you use a lot, and the writes are less common. The swapfile is a special case, but it can be wearlevelled across the entire drive.

I do agree that a couple of years will make a big difference, though. I plan to look in to an SSD around the release of 10.7 or thereabouts, presumably in about 18 months time.

[Spheric Harlot]

Both sequential read and write are crazy fast on the OCZ Vertex series:

Serious Competition: Intel X25-M and Five SSD from OCZ Technology (page 6) - X-bit labs

I don't think there's any 2.5" hard drive that reaches a constant 200 MByte/sec write rate.

This sort of stuff *is* vital when you're doing production work.

[CharlesS]

The only advantages to a traditional hard drive are size and cost. I expect that as SSDs get traction and start to benefit from greater economies of scale, the cost issue should be greatly diminished, and as for size, SSDs already seem to be catching up (to laptop drives, anyway) there.

I wouldn't be surprised if platter-based hard drives end up seeming like a quaint relic by five years or so from now.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

The only advantages to a traditional hard drive are size and cost.

QFT.

In terms of raw performance not a single notebook HDD has the slightest chance compared to an Intel X25-M SSD.

[Spheric Harlot]

...until intel publishes a firmware compaibility update that inadvertenly cripples transfer rates.

I'd wait another tWo years until this stuff works reliably and predictably.

[Veltliner]

Originally Posted by Simon 

Read the thread. Matshita drives (which many Macs come with) don't allow VLC to circumvent the region coding of the drive.

[Edit: turtle just beat me to it]

Maybe this had changed. But I used to watch DVDs I got from Europe on my iMac. I haven't done it in a while, so it might have been my old G5 iMac, and things might have changed since then.

I feel several European DVDs rolling my way this Christmas. I guess I'll have to rip them in Mac the ripper and burn a new CD without region codes in order to to be able to watch them.

It's really high time to stop this region nonsense that was only put in place to protect the starting dates of Hollywood blockbusters (which one used to be months apart, while now movies come out all over the world at approximately at the same time)

[P]

If you have a Matshita drive, you can't even rip a disc of the wrong region.

Not sure when it changed - my old iMac G5 had a Matshita drive with an early version of this block - but then Apple has always mixed and matched with the DVD suppliers. My recommendation stands: If you have a Matshita drive, buy an external DVD. Preferably one that you know you can remove the region code on.

[Eug]

BTW, for CD ripping, my several year old desktop Pioneer DVD drive in a Firewire 400 case is roughly 60-75% faster than my internal laptop Optiarc drive in my Core i7 iMac.

[stokie]

Originally Posted by Slrman 

I have a 2.66 GHz iMac (early 2008, it says) and live in Brazil. I have a few DVD movies and a friend brought a new one to see last night. I had to change my region from 1 to 4 so we cold see it, but this is limited to 4 more times, so I really would like a software fix to allow me to set to region 0 or to intercept the file before it even asks for that.

I've tried setting the preference opening VLC, but VLC (v1.03) doesn't play the movie.

My drive is:
MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-875:

Firmware Revision: DB09
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipping Drive)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -R DL, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, DVD-DAO

Anyone of of a fix for this drive? The older thread on this here didn't address this drive. IN any case, the thread was too old to permit more posts. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Hi,
I have a new iMac, DVD drive is OPTIARC DVD RW AD-5680H.
I've been searching for a way to play a region 2 DVD my friend loaned me, one of the posts suggested when the iDVD change region map opens up, just ignore it, so I did, and it worked! Thanks for the help, whoever it was!!

Don't click cancel in the iDVD dialog, because that just ejects the disc, open VLC player and click "Disc" when it asks what you want to play.

After it started, I did a Force Quit on iDVD and it went away.

I hope this is useful to someone.