Mac dvd drives - region specific?

[musicman691]

I'm sure a lot of us have run into a problem with dvd's and our home entertainment systems and region specificity. IOW a region 2 dvd won't play in a region 1 player. That got me to wondering (and this is not an academic exercise) are the dvd drives in Macs region agnostic or what? I've had to return several dvd's ordered from Amazon over the years because they were other than region 1 dvd's. Would be neat to get them and be able to play on my 2012 cheesegrater.


From what I can suss out it's not the hardware that makes a home entertainment system dvd player region specific but something in the firmware. What makes me think that is the plethora of instructions out there that allow one to hack a player to play all region dvd's. And those sellers that sell so-called region-free players those players are NOT covered by the manufacturer's warranty.

[Darryl Ramm]

Changing the locale of a Mac DVD player is usually easy, but with a limit that it can only be changed a few times.

It is trivial to bypass the region encoding using alternate approaches. DVD security and encryption has some serious issues. Region encoding bypasses is just one of them.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Changing the locale of a Mac DVD player is usually easy, but with a limit that it can only be changed a few times.

It is trivial to bypass the region encoding using alternate approaches. DVD security and encryption has some serious issues. Region encoding bypasses is just one of them.

So you're saying Mac dvd drives are region specific then? How can I tell what region I have? How do I change the region? Usually you're a lot more expansive with your answers than what you've written here.


edit for additional:
Found this https://support.apple.com/guide/dvd-...n-cpdv1503/mac and that explains some. Now if I could only find a region zero dvd. Or is there another way to change the region?

[JFreak]

DVD is dead media. But if you have lots of movies in different region discs, just buy one for region1 and another for region2 so you don't have a problem.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by JFreak

DVD is dead media. But if you have lots of movies in different region discs, just buy one for region 1 and another for region 2 so you don't have a problem.

DVD is NOT dead media - why do you think movies are still being sold/produced on dvd? I don't stream movies (I want to play movies when I want without having to connect to the net) and I don't go to movie theatres. Having separate dvd players for separate regions is simplistic at best. Besides I don't have that much room for yet another piece of electronic equipment in my living room.


Thing is there are some concert dvd's that are only available on region 2 and those are ones I want to play. I don't fancy having a multi-region dvd player that isn't covered from the get-go by the manufacturer's warranty.

[JFreak]

Sure DVD has 5.1 but it is SD picture. Good riddance. But because the region can only be changed like 3 or 5 times, you really need two players for two regions. They are dirt cheap so why wouldn't you?

[mjslakeridge]

Use some free software like DVD-Shrink to rip the DVD into your computer, then burn a DVD. It seems to get around the region thing.

[JFreak]

HandBrake seems to be the favourite ripper on this side of the pond. But before ripping you need to also install "libdvdcss"

[Darryl Ramm]

Yes well I was not going to describe actually how to defeat licensing protection on DUC... :-O

[mjslakeridge]

Sorry, I didn't know that was frowned upon Darryl. I just use it to archive my DVD's.