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DVD drives limited re foreign encodings?
Authored by: elanjourno on Jul 03, '02 04:41:23PM

This app sounds fantastic. But I wonder if there's a limit to its usefulness with regard to DVDs encoded for foreign markets.

I read that the DVD drives in current PowerBooks (and possibly desktops) will play DVDs encoded for regions other than North America. But there's a limit to the number of times you can do that: apparently each time you use a foreign disk there's a switch that is offset. When you play a NA DVD, that switch is reset. After x times, it sticks with whatever was the most recently used encoding format. (So you could end up locking out the North American encoding.)

So, does VLC override this issue?



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DVD drives limited re foreign encodings?
Authored by: zarbs on Jul 03, '02 11:34:47PM

The behavior you describe is true of all DVD drives in computers. The only reason you don't see the messages is because all drives come with the default region set to 1 for the USA. If you never play DVD's from another region you will never have to worry about the problem of changes on your drive. You have a maximum of five changes of region before the firmware on the mechanism has the fifth selection set in firmware so it can not be changed again. There are applications like Region X that allow you to make more changes than the normal five once you have removed the region protection from the drive. The best site for firmware cracks is www.firmware.fr.st. Here you will find cracks for most Mac installed DVD-ROM drives as well as DVD-R drives to make them region free.



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DVD drives limited re foreign encodings?
Authored by: sam on Jul 04, '02 04:28:04AM

To read and decrypt DVDs, VLC uses the libdvdcss library which does not care about the region code (unlike most commercial players). It should play all DVDs, whatever you drive's region is.



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foreign encodings dont work
Authored by: jsil on Jul 04, '02 01:53:42PM

That should be the case, but it isn't.
I tried to play a Japanese encoded dvd (region 2), and the menu nav didn't work, and the audio was just static.

the video did work, but you had to navigate to the different sections using the load disk function and then select the sections using the "title" selector.

Just as an aside, the dvd played fine using apple's dvd player.



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