Changing the region code of DVD-Drive

Ted Mittelstaedt tedm at toybox.placo.com
Mon Oct 17 01:26:13 PDT 2005



>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of cpghost
>Sent: Monday, October 17, 2005 1:06 AM
>To: Ted Mittelstaedt
>Cc: Garrett Cooper; Alastair G. Hogge; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: Re: Changing the region code of DVD-Drive
>
>
>On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 12:32:07AM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> Yes, most are.  Search the Internet with google, there's many websites
>> that have patched firmware that locks out the region coding.
>One of the
>> first things I do when buying a new DVD is to flash it with patched
>> firmware
>> that disables region codes.
>
>Ah, good to know! So does this mean that if I already switched between
>region 1 and region 2 DVDs 100+ times, that the drive has already been
>flashed to RPC1 by the vendor?
>

The drives I've dealt with seem to have a bit of nvram somewhere that
when you set
it to region 1 the first time that you play a DVD in it, a flag is set in
that nvram.

The patches appear to make the DVD drive ignore the setting of that flag,
as a result
it seems immaterial what you have done with the drive pre-patch.

>BTW, almost all flashers are DOS oder Windows-based. Do we have a
>FreeBSD-based general purpose flasher for this kind of stuff?
>

Since I think it's illegal to do this in the first place I would say be
happy
they exist at all. ;-)

I doubt something like this would be written for FreeBSD.  It's massive
overkill for
nothing because once the DVD drive firmware is patched to ignore region
codes,
you never have to patch it again.

Ted



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