Playing DVDs

From MacFAQ

DVD Region Encoding

American film companies generally try to release films in American cinemas a few months before they reach the UK. Sometimes, a film is even available on DVD in America before it reaches the UK, so they needed to devise a way to keep British people watching American films in the UK cinemas (instead of importing an American DVD). They came up with region encoding, and their theory is that you shouldn't be able to play a US (in region 1) DVD on a UK (in region 2) DVD player.

Naturally though, because there is a much greater selection of old (as well as new) films available as region 1 than region 2 DVDs, a lot of people try to bypass the region encoding on their drives and players, in order to exercise their fair use rights to play those DVDs wherever they had been purchased.

A drive classed as RPC-2 is region-limited. You can switch between regions only five times before the drive is locked, and will read only disks of the last region switch.

A drive classed as RPC-1 is region-free. A region-free drive will allow you to read discs from any region. But remember that the MacOS DVD playing application itself is also counting switches, so you need bypass this check too.

Most new computers, including all iMacs, are supplied with RPC-2 drives.

Playing Multi-region DVDs on a UK Mac

This is much easier now than it was a couple of years ago. So long as you're using MacOS X, you may simply download [[1][Video Lan Client]] which is usually able to play all DVDs. It is free, and it is safe since it doesn't require you to make hardware or firmware modifications to your computer.