New iMac G5 owner... slight question

Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
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!)

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 13
    telomartelomar Posts: 1,804member
    Really doesn't have much to do with Apple. Has more to do with Panasonic and the MPAA. Not really sure what you can do except remove the regioning code and reburn it. You'd need a DL drive though.
  • Reply 2 of 13
    hi WickEd, I have the same problem with my iBook, I live in Paraguay (Region 4) but I also have a lot of Region 1 Dvds. To solve my problem I'm using VLC, is a free video player that can read any dvd region, the only problem is that is a little difficult to use when your region dvd drive is not the same as the Dvd your tring to watch, but it works fine!
  • Reply 3 of 13
    placeboplacebo Posts: 5,767member
    Yes, VLC rocks.



    Download it here.
  • Reply 4 of 13
    Quote:

    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.
  • Reply 5 of 13
    yes you have to set up your dvd drive with one the regions, choose the region which you have the mosts dvds, once you done this you can use VLC to watch the other dvds as well. Anyway, that 5 changes that you are allow to use can be reset via some software up to 3 times more in some cases, giving you 15 chnages instead of five
  • Reply 6 of 13
    Ahh I see!



    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?
  • Reply 7 of 13
    I have more region 1 dvds than regions 2 so I use Apple DVD Player to play my regions 1 dvds by default and VLC to play the others dvds
  • Reply 8 of 13
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Quote:

    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.
  • Reply 9 of 13
    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??
  • Reply 10 of 13
    Quote:

    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
  • Reply 11 of 13
    Hi,



    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.
  • Reply 12 of 13
    a_greera_greer Posts: 4,594member
    We on the windows side dont have that problem once "patches" are applied </gloating>
  • Reply 13 of 13
    Quote:

    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.
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