Having a Powerbook G4 (15" 1.67GHz) which I bought in the fall of 2005 I have ever since been trying to find out how to make my DVD "Superdrive" region-free. I was told that while other DVD drive could be firmware updated to do this it was impossible with my particular drive, until now!
My drive is a Matshita UJ-846 and I made it into an RPC-1 drive (region-free) by updating it with firmware found at the
Macbook Fr page.
Also have a look at
the firmware page for a full list of downloadable firmware if your Matshita drive isn't listed at the above site. Apparently several "impossible to make region-free" Matshita drives are represented there.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
- make sure that you haven't "used up" all your region changes already. You can change the region of your DVD drive 5 times. After that you're locked at the last region you used. From what I've been told this also means that you can't even make it region free by using the new firmware. Then again I really don't know and you might want to give it a go anyway.
- before/after updating the firmware you can check the region-free status of your drive by using an application called
DVD-info X. If you've successfully turned your drive into a "region-free" drive you can switch between regions as many times as you want. You still have to reset the region-count though. Do this with the Region-X tool (available from the MacBook FR page (link above). While an RPC-2 drive locks the region after 5 changes, an RPC-1 drive will let you reset this number from 0 changes to 5 new changes again, so you can continue switching between regions.
Hope someone finds this useful. Needless to say I was overjoyed when I heard about it.
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