Play DVDs from any region

Dec 06, '05 05:17:00AM

Contributed by: Azumanga

Most Macs have region-encoded DVD drives, and you only get to change regions a few times before you get stuck with one region. On some Macs, it is possible to do complicated reflashing of BIOSes to get around this, but not on all, and that has its own dangers.

Instead, just play your DVDs using VLC. It just ignores region encoding, letting you play whatever DVD you like (it works this way with the PC version, too, in case you have one of those in addition to your Mac). It has a number of other nice features, like letting you skip previously-unskippable parts of DVDs ... and you can even take screenshots.

The only tiny problem with this is that Apple's DVD player will try to automatically load and make you change the region when you insert an out-of-region DVD. If you quit it, it will eject the DVD. You can either force-quit it, or for a more long-term solution, go into System Preferences -> CDs & DVDs, and disable auto-loading it when you run DVDs.

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