Circumventing the Pesky DVD Region Code on Your Mac
One of the bizarrely distressing aspects about using a Mac to watch DVDs is the 5 time limit that you can switch the region code of your DVD player. Although less and less of an issue now that we can download movies, it’s still annoying when I want to watch a DVD that was manufactured in another country.
Down to my last allowed region switch on my Mac, I had to make a commitment to the US region 1 which effectively locked me out of watching any of my foreign purchased DVDs ever again on my laptop. So I sought a way to circumvent the security measure.
Initially my search revealed a lot of hacks for the DVD player firmware. Not such a good idea if you’re not used hacking things like firmware. One slip and you could permanently disable your DVD player.
However, digging a little deeper, I found a solution that I’ve been using for the last six months with perfect results.
VLC is an open source media player that ignores region code on RPC-1 firmware drives making it a region-free player. Unfortunately every time I put a DVD in my laptop, the Mac DVD player would open up and start playing the video or give me a choose a region code message. To get around that I went to my System Preferences in the CD/DVD section and changed the default behavior of the DVD.
The VLC player is good, but not as good Apple’s DVD player. However, it’s not anything that will interrupt your viewing. To get DVD to play in VLC, slide your DVD into the laptop and choose Open Disk from the file menu and choose your DVD.
I haven’t tested connecting the player through my laptop to a big TV, mostly because I’m using the computer for portability and convenience. If I were to start watching my foreign manufactured DVDs on my home TV, I’d spend the hundred bucks and get a region free DVD player.
Region codes were developed in 1997, when movies had rolling release dates and downloading a movie was unheard of. These days they’re an annoyance. As Mike Ryan at Wired Magazine found when he researched his excellent article about region codes:
We asked Universal, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Sony and got a collective “no comment.” Screen Digest analyst Tom Adams says there’s a reason for that defensive posturing, however toothless. “Whether or not the codes are there,” he says, “the idea that they are is probably a good thing from the studios’ point of view.”
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