Powerbook DVD region free?

Mac @ttack · #1 September 9th, 2005, 01:37 PM

Hello all,

Is it possible to make the DVD player/writer in my G4 Powerbook 12" multi region?

Many thanks.

mac @ttack

Bob

scruffy · #2 September 10th, 2005, 12:23 AM

You might be able to do it by flashing the firmware on the drive, but I'd consider it pretty risky.

Have you tried videolan? It's not the most elegant interface, but it's all software, so there's no risk of trashing anything...

**Giaguara** · #3 September 10th, 2005, 12:46 PM

There are some hacks around... that may or may not work.
If your Powerbook is covered by any warranty, I would not use the hacks as those will void all the warranties you had.

Some hacks work .. I know someone who added some hacks to their 17" PowerBook and that caused the superdrive to not burn ANY DVDs after.

So as we need region 1, 2 and 4 disks home, we have one PowerBook set to region 1, everything else to region 2, and have bought a world DVD player for livingroom playing everything.

scruffy · #4 September 10th, 2005, 06:59 PM

That's why I'd suggest videolan - it's not a hack to the DVD drive, it just declines to use the DVD-specific services the drive offers (which are tied to region codes), but reads the raw data from the disk and decodes entirely in CPU - essentially treating the DVD drive a pure optical data reader.

Therefore it's much more CPU intensive than a regular DVD player. I can watch a DVD on my 300 MHz G3 only because the drive itself does much of the preprocessing; videolan would not run acceptably on such hardware. This means I'm tied by the region codes.

A G4 with a reasonable speed might be able to handle DVD processing entirely in CPU - in any case, worth a try.