restoring region coding to Superdrive

[alfiesy]

There are programs to remove the Region Coding (RCE) of Combo Drives and Superdrives installed in Macs. Is there a way to restore the region coding restriction to prevent voiding of warranty?

[Edited on 6-3-2004 by alfiesy]

[El CaMOTe]

Yeah, a Swiss friend of mine with a 1Gig TiBook came over last X'mas and told me he was just about to loose his Superdrive if he changed the Region Code one more time !!

Not to clear on this restriction. Anyway, anybody got a workaround or a hack for this ??

[gonz]

Originally posted by El CaMOTe
Yeah, a Swiss friend of mine with a 1Gig TiBook came over last X'mas and told me he was just about to loose his Superdrive if he changed the Region Code one more time !!

He won't lose his SuperDrive. All he will lose is the ability to change the DVD region code. His SuperDrive will then be permanently fixed to the last region code to which it was set. Your friend should stick to playing DVDs from one region only. There are hacks out there to either reset back to five the number of times one is allowed to change the code, or to remove the region code restriction altogether on certain drive models. But these are unsupported by Apple, and will definitely void warranty. Not to mention, don't try messing with this stuff if you don't know what you're doing.

[Edited on 6-3-2004 by gonz]

[Henjie]

Originally posted by alfiesy
There are programs to remove the Region Coding (RCE) of Combo Drives and Superdrives installed in Macs. Is there a way to restore the region coding restriction to prevent voiding of warranty?

Depending on the exact model of the drive and the current firmware being used, it can be as simple as flashing the drive with the official, non-region-free firmware.

Originally posted by El CaMOTe
Yeah, a Swiss friend of mine with a 1Gig TiBook came over last X'mas and told me he was just about to loose his Superdrive if he changed the Region Code one more time !!

Not to clear on this restriction. Anyway, anybody got a workaround or a hack for this ??

What Gonz said. RPC-2 (non-region-free) drives allow you to reset the drive region five times before "locking" the region to the fifth one.

If your friend's SuperDrive is the Matsushita UJ-815, there's a hacked RPC-1 (region-free) firmware available for it. He can use that firmware if he's not worried about the whole firmware flashing thingy. If something goes wrong during the flashing process, his drive is toast. I wouldn't worry about it though. I've flashed countless drives with tons of hacked firmwares and haven't had one drive die on me yet. The procedure is safe as long as you follow one rule: don't interrupt the flashing process. ;-)

Or, your friend can just use VLC to watch DVDs on his TiBook. VLC bypasses the drive's region code settings entirely. Just make sure his Mac is set to open VLC instead of DVD Player whenever a DVD is inserted (System Preferences -> CDs & DVDs).


~Henjie

[directX]

I have never setup the region settings on my powerbooks primarily because I do not use the DVD player. I use VLC, as Henjie has mentioned above.

[El CaMOTe]

thanks guys, I will get this over to Marcel !!