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  1. Member
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    Hello and good day!

    I am an American who's now living in Europe with the US military. I have a collection of DVDs that are American region and have bought a couple European region dvds. The AAFES store sells region-free DVD players, so that is not an issue. But when I am playing them on my laptop, it says I only have so many times I can switchc back and forth between regions before it locks.

    I was wondering is there a way to do an unlimited amount of changes, because it's not really fair cos I don't have a way to buy only one-style of region dvds. OR is there a way to have it set on one region and to play the other region through another program?

    Thank you so much, I appreciate any help that you can give!

    Michael
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  2. Member hech54's Avatar
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    Try this first(it's free):
    https://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVD43
    If not then you need to pay for something like AnyDVD.
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  3. I'm not 100% sure of it, but I think that VLC is able to play DVD from any region/zone.
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  4. Member hech54's Avatar
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    This is in the MAC forum? Sorry....didn't notice that till now.
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  5. Member hech54's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by jpschuck View Post
    I'm not 100% sure of it, but I think that VLC is able to play DVD from any region/zone.
    Almost:


    Does VLC support DVDs from all regions?

    This mostly depends on your DVD drive. Testing it is usually the quickest way to find out. The problem is that a lot of newer drives are RPC2 drives these days. Some of these drives don't allow raw access to the drive untill the drive firmware has done a regioncheck. VLC uses libdvdcss and it needs raw access to the DVD drive to crack the encryption key. So with those drives it is impossible to circumvent the region protection. (This goes for all software. You will need to flash your drives firmware, but sometimes there is no alternate firmware available for your drive). On other RPC2 drives that do allow raw access, it might take VLC a long time to crack the key. So just pop the disc in your drive and try it out, while you get a coffee. RPC1 drives should 'always' work regardless of the regioncode.
    http://www.videolan.org/support/faq.html
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  6. Member edDV's Avatar
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    If you copy the DVD to DVDR media, the region restrictions disappear. This also protects the original by taking the copy remote with the laptop.
    Recommends: Kiva.org - Loans that change lives.
    http://www.kiva.org/about
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  7. That's right, and you can also decrypt the DVD to the hard drive (DVD Decrypter, DVDFab HD Decrypter, or whatever MAC people use for this) for playing and you won't use up any more of the region changes.
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  8. Explorer Case's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by glocherfan View Post
    When I am playing them on my laptop, it says I only have so many times I can switchc back and forth between regions before it locks. I was wondering is there a way to do an unlimited amount of changes [...].
    Drives with RPC-2 (Regional Playback Control v2) firmware get permanently locked to the last region after 5 changes. Drives with RPC-1 firmware are not locked in hardware (but in software, also after 5 changes). Depending on the brand and model of your laptop's DVD drive, it may be possible to replace the RPC-2 firmware with RPC-1 firmware, so that the number of region changes that are still left, may be manipulated with certain software.

    Originally Posted by glocherfan
    Or is there a way to have it set on one region and to play the other region through another program?
    The lock is in the optical drive (hardware). Using another program wouldn't have any impact. Two optical drives (e.g. one external) would solve it, as one could be set to Region 1 and the other to Region 2. Or make region-free copies of the DVDs.
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