Show remaining DVD Player region switches

Dec 05, '06 07:30:03AM

Contributed by: boredzo

If you've ever bought DVDs from a different DVD region and tried to play them in your existing DVD drive, you probably know what a bane DVD region coding is.

Now, most DVD drives will allow you to change regions some finite number of times. After that, the region is permanently set. So you may find it helpful to know how many region changes you have remaining until this happens. The answer is in DVD Player. Choose Get Disc Info from the File menu (or press Command-I), and from there, switch to the Regions pane. You'll see a map of Earth showing all the regions, the region(s) of the current disc, the current region of the drive, and at the bottom, the number of region changes remaining for your drive.

[robg adds: If you own a lot of out-of-region DVDs, you can use VLC to play them instead of Apple's DVD Player. As explained in this hint, VLC ignores the region flag. There are other ways of solving the problem, but I'll leave discovery of those solutions up to you and Google.]

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