Stuck In Region 2

[Broncs]

Hi All,
Long time viewer,first time poster.

I travel a fair bit with my trusty ASUS laptop and have always been able to play any DVD anywhere. All of a sudden, while trying to watch one of my favourite (Oz) DVDs (in Germany), it tells me my laptop is stuck in region 2. It's never happened before.

Not being very laptop literate I have no idea where to look to rectify the problem. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Regards, Broncs.

[Parapunter]

XP?

Start>right click my computer>select manage, find your dvd drive from device manager & change region from there - read the warning carefully though...

[green granite]

Some software will only allow so many views of different regions it then sticks in the last played region.

I tried to view a dvd on my beast WMP told me to pi$$ off as it was copyrighted and the DRM forbad playing it ???????? I used Nero instead. :hmm:

[ZH875]

Depending on the Laptop and DVD drive, there is a setting in the Registry which will reset the Region change count back to 5 available.

My old laptop is a HiGrade which is an ASUS by any other name, and has this feature.

[BigEndBob]

Download VLC player, plays just about anything.
Also CCCP for codecs.

[Broncs]

Thanks for all your replies. I have downloaded the VLC player which works great. The other solutions I looked at looked a bit short term with me travelling so much. Very much appreciate all your suggestions.

Regards, Broncs

[Tinstaafl]

Depending on the DVD drive in your laptop you might be able to flash its firmware to remove the region coding restriction. That would turn it from an RPC2 drive to an RPC1 drive.

Go to www.rpc1.org and see if a fix is available for your machine. You will also need to download something like 'driveinfo' to get your drive's information and to confirm its region free status afterwards. Do an internet search to find driveinfo.

I've reflashed several drives using information & firmwares via rpc1.org. Well worth the time to remove the f^&$ing user-hating media conglomerate's region coding.

You should note that the drive is only part of the fix. The operating system & the media software also can have region coding limitations. Up to WinXP they're pretty easy to work around - especially with the plethora of media players available. Linux, of course, has no such issues.