Alan Goodridge's daughter wants to play British (Region 2) DVDs, but she lives in the US (Region 1)
Is it possible to run a second (external) DVD drive for playing back DVDs from a different region? My daughter lives in the US, and uses her laptop's internal drive to play Region 1 discs, but she would like to be able to play some of her UK (Region 2) discs. I'm aware that some DVD drives are multi-region but don't know how to determine whether one of those is fitted. I have given her an external DVD-RW drive (UK sourced) but she is reluctant to use it in case it affects the settings on her laptop and eventually prevents her from playing Region 1 DVDs on the internal drive.
Alan Goodridge
I haven't actually tried this myself, but I can't see a problem with using an external drive to play Region 2 discs, and perhaps a reader can confirm this works. At worst, your daughter should get a pop-up asking if she wants to change a drive's region, so all she has to do is click No.
Get your daughter to download a very small (7K) free utility called DriveInfo. This will check both drives and tell your daughter whether they are protected and, if so, how many times she can change the region setting. The usual maximum is five.
If the external DVD drive has not been pre-set, your daughter may need to set the region in Microsoft Windows. To do this in Windows XP, plug the drive in, right-click the My Computer icon and select Properties, click the Hardware tab, and then click the button labelled Device Manager. This will open a separate window listing the PCs hardware. Click the plus sign next to the entry for DVD/CD-ROM Drives to open that section, and it should be obvious which drive is which. Double-clicking the name of the external drive will bring up its Properties sheet, where one of the tabs says "DVD Region". This tab will tell her the current region setting. It also includes a list of countries for people who want to change the region.
I expect both your daughter's DVD drives will be protected.
In the early days of region coding, DVD drives used a "regional playback control" system called RPC-1, but the PC software used to play DVDs could ignore it. VLC, for example, was effectively a "region free" media player. In fact, I'd still recommend your daughter to try VLC and use it for DVD playback rather than Windows Media Player. (VLC is open source, and it's a waste of time putting copy restrictions in open source code: someone would just take them out.)
About a decade ago, the entertainment industry started to enforce RPC-2. This stores the region code in the DVD drive's firmware. RPC-2 can be circumvented by entering the right unlocking code (which some manufacturers make available) using a DVD player's remote control, or by patching the firmware chip, if a patch is available. This is somewhat risky, and would invalidate any remaining warranty.
Another approach is to use "region killer" software that bypasses the region coding, or a media player that includes this type of feature. Examples include the AnyDVD and BlazeDVD Free DVD players, and DVD Region Killer 2.7 or DVD 43 ("DVD for free"). AnyDVD is available on a 21-day free trial but after that must be purchased, so the free version of BlazeDVD is the one to try first, followed if necessary by DVD 43. The MajorGeeks site says that DVD Region Killer does not work with RPC-2 drives.
Unfortunately, this is an area fraught with legal problems, and some sites have been taken down under America's notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA is intended to stop the distribution of software and devices intended to circumvent DRM (Digital Rights Management) or copy-protection systems, though in some cases there may be a "fair use" provision.
The Content Scrambling System (CSS) used by DVDs has been cracked and the DMCA cannot uncrack it. It makes it more difficult for people to enjoy their legally purchased content – your daughter being a case in point – but it does nothing to stop commercial pirates from flooding markets with counterfeit DVDs. Nor does it stop people from downloading pirate copies of movies from what we've apparently started to call "cyberlockers": download sites such as Rapidshare, Fileserve, Filesonic, MegaUpload, DepositFiles, Wupload, Hotfile, FileFactory, Oron and many more.
Of course, if the external DVD drive does play her Region 2 DVDs, none of this will be necessary. However, buying a different DVD player for each region setting probably isn't the cheapest or most practical solution.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/askjack/2011/sep/01/ask-jack-dvd-regions
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