New iMac G5 owner... slight question
I'm not going to bother with the glowing reviews of the new 20 inch behemoth sitting infront of me because you've all heard it all before!
I just have one question regarding something I know has probably caused many ripples in the industry on previous occasions - the DVD regioning on the SuperDrive(/ComboDrive).
I buy DVDs from all around the world, legally, and this is the first time I have ever been penalised for doing that. I just inserted a local DVD (Region 4 - Australia?) and DVD Player has popped up, but OS X has asked me to set the region for the drive to Region 4 (and told me that I can only change it 5 more times). It also came up with an option to change it to Region 2 - I'm not sure why.
I plan to play these local disks, along with many other discs from the USA, Canada and China (among anywhere given else) because I have returned home from holidays from these places in the past 5 - 8 years!
Anyway, I know this has probably been documented endlessly, no doubt complained about beyond imagination, but I am having trouble finding some cold hard facts about this issue. Is this a permanent problem for drives in Macs? Can any software undo this? Am I really destined to be one day confined to a single region?
All help is glady appreciated. Hell, don't even write replies - link me if the content is available. I know there would be weblogs/articles/tech support for all this kind of stuff. I'm too afraid to post something like this in the Apple official discusson forums - helpful though they are - because of the nature of the inquiry.
Thanks for your time guys.
(P.S. this keyboard rocks. It's so silky smooth and makes typing fun again. Truly!)
I just have one question regarding something I know has probably caused many ripples in the industry on previous occasions - the DVD regioning on the SuperDrive(/ComboDrive).
I buy DVDs from all around the world, legally, and this is the first time I have ever been penalised for doing that. I just inserted a local DVD (Region 4 - Australia?) and DVD Player has popped up, but OS X has asked me to set the region for the drive to Region 4 (and told me that I can only change it 5 more times). It also came up with an option to change it to Region 2 - I'm not sure why.
I plan to play these local disks, along with many other discs from the USA, Canada and China (among anywhere given else) because I have returned home from holidays from these places in the past 5 - 8 years!
Anyway, I know this has probably been documented endlessly, no doubt complained about beyond imagination, but I am having trouble finding some cold hard facts about this issue. Is this a permanent problem for drives in Macs? Can any software undo this? Am I really destined to be one day confined to a single region?
All help is glady appreciated. Hell, don't even write replies - link me if the content is available. I know there would be weblogs/articles/tech support for all this kind of stuff. I'm too afraid to post something like this in the Apple official discusson forums - helpful though they are - because of the nature of the inquiry.
Thanks for your time guys.
(P.S. this keyboard rocks. It's so silky smooth and makes typing fun again. Truly!)
Comments
Download it here.
Originally posted by Placebo
Yes, VLC rocks.
Download it here.
Hey, thanks for the replies guys.
I understand it a bit more now. I have refused to set the region to any at the moment - I just canceled the dialog box and told OS X to ignore future DVDs. I'm having trouble playing the DVD in VLC though. Should I use one of the "Changes" (of 5 that I have) to set it to one particular region - then VLC will be able to play it? I don't want to risk screwing things up permanently for myself.
Thanks for the info mate. I'll set it to one of the regions.
So do you have any big troubles playing stuff in VLC? It seems like a pretty solid program. If you have your DVD player set to a certain region, and you go into System Preferences to tell DVDs to open with VLC, is it just going to play straight up? It doesn't take any AppleScripts and/or reformatting of your HDD drive does it?
Originally posted by WickEd
So do you have any big troubles playing stuff in VLC? It seems like a pretty solid program.
Another thumbs up for VLC!
You'll find plenty of reading on it by googling VLC and the name of a feature you have questions on. This should turn up numerous posts on various bulletin boards. In the past, this is how I figured out subtitling formats and VLC.
Originally posted by s.metcalf
Wasn't there a way to set the drive to Region 0 (ie plays all regions) using some hack? Or is it just that region 0 encoded DVDs play in all region encoded drives??
The DVD-drive can be flashed from RPC-2 to RPC-1 (region free) with firmware upgrade, but there seems to be no upgrade available for the new iMac G5 yet. Even this method requires some interaction from the user, like resetting region manually via program to the right one or completely resetting the counter to zero (which both are really easy, one click). The bad thing is, that flashing your DVD-drive voids warranty. So if anything goes wrong, your're on your own. This is not Apple-approved stuff.
But, as said, there's no upgrade available yet so...
You're probably better of using VLC.
tómppu
Yeah I've been reading up on this and have actually made contact with the developer of the firmware patch for old PowerBook drives (UJ-815/6 - the new iMacs and newer PowerBooks contain UJ-825). Unfortunately his hands are tied at the moment because the firmware can only be successfully upgraded using a updater that needs to be coded by some smart Russian teenager or created by Apple and liscened to a developer who wants to use it for firmware.
Unfortunately it's a bit of a waiting game for those of us with the new iMac G5s!
That's the story so far, as I believe.
Originally posted by a_greer
We on the windows side dont have that problem once "patches" are applied </gloating>
It's a DVD drive issue and not really an OS issue, so you can update the firmware / patch the drive on the Mac as well. The only thing is if anything goes wrong, you are on your own.