How to Unlock DVD Regions on Your Mac and PC: Tech Clinic

Q: I have a large collection of imported DVDs. However, my laptop DVD player only allows me to switch "regions" a fixed number of times. Is there any way around this?

A: Most commercial DVDs use encryption that keeps them locked to one or more "region codes," meaning the discs you pick up in other continents usually won't play on an American DVD player. If you believe the movie studios, this encryption is a necessary tool in the ongoing war against piracy. Basically, it helps them release the same movie in different parts of the world—at different times and for different prices. However, because pirates rarely resell legitimate copies of movies (they are pirates, after all), this system's primary effect is to prevent movie collectors and frequent travelers from enjoying legally purchased films once they get home.

There are some multiregion DVD players out there. They are perfectly legal, but they tend to be pricey and rare. And if you are the jet-setting type who is likely to pick up foreign flicks in the first place, you probably want to watch them on the go using your laptop. That's why the most frustrating part of region codes is the way they affect laptop DVD players.

Although laptop DVD drives are technologically capable of playing any DVD, they typically force you to switch among region settings to play imported discs. Try switching this setting more than a fixed number of times (typically five over the entire life span of the computer), and the setting will be locked forever.

For example, if you switch from Region 1 (the United States and Canada) to Region 3 (parts of Asia) to watch a kung-fu flick you picked up on a trip to Hong Kong, you'll have to switch back to Region 1 before playing any movies you purchased at your local Best Buy. Watching that one Jet Li movie just burned up two of your five switches—and not even reinstalling your operating system will get you more. Fortunately, some clever programmers have created software solutions that circumvent disc regions entirely, turning your notebook into a portable multiregion DVD player.

n 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.)

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.

Windows users have the most options, the best of which is probably Remote Selector—a free software utility that interacts with your DVD-playing program, allowing it to play DVDs from any region.

Things get trickier with Macs. I recommend downloading VLC, an open-source media player that sometimes circumvents region encoding. The DVD drives on different computers (including various Macs) come from diverse manufacturers, and VLC plays out-of-region discs on some, but not all of them. Unfortunately, there's no way to know if it will work on your system until you try. Fortunately, the program is free.

Of course, if this sounds complicated, and you don't want to deal with it (and really, why would you?), there are plenty of programs for both Macs and PCs that allow you to rip DVD movies onto your hard drive. And while this solution has its advantages (chief among them is that watching movies off your hard drive uses far less battery life than reading them from an optical disc), it puts you in a legal gray area–ironic, considering such actions are necessitated by the studios' attempts to crack down on criminals.

Lastly, there is a nuclear option of sorts. You can try installing third-party firmware on your laptop's DVD drive that disables its region locking. Such firmware is available online, but if you don't know what you're doing, this brings the very real possibility of causing serious damage to your machine, and it will almost certainly void your warranty.