DVD/laptop problem

Folks,

I have a modern Toshiba laptop and a mix of DVDs bought in Europe, and North America. Having alternated watching the two different regional types of DVD, this new laptop is now displaying a box saying that I must chose a region and in effect, stick with it. My old laptop allowed me to play both whenever I wanted. I know DVD players can be 'programmed' to play both using codes from the net, but can laptops?

Help

Thanks in advance

Jonny

 

Download Div X Player its an easy soloution...

Div X Player

 

Cheers Marky. I will give it a go. Meanwhile if anyone else has a steer, I would love to hear from them.

Rgds

Jonny

 

Cilud be to do with the version of windows media player you are using, go to www.download.com and try to find the version you had on your own laptop. I've got windowss media classic for running dvds and WMP 10 for tunes.

 

Try AnyDVD .

Has the following features:

AnyDVD works in the background to automatically remove the copy protection of a DVD movie as soon as it's inserted into the drive, allowing you then to backup the movie using a DVD backup tool such as CloneDVD and CloneDVD mobile. You can also remove the RPC region code, thereby making the movie region free and viewable on any DVD player and with any DVD player software.

Just set your laptop to region 2 and use this program to fool windows into thinking it is a region 1 dvd drive.

 

Try here, might have some programmes on.

http://www.videohelp.com

But they have codes for almost any DVD player.

 

Unfortunately using the DIVX player will not solve this problem.

The problem here is that the DVD drive in the laptop will be an "off the shelf" item and Toshiba will just fit them.

The reason why you have been able to change the region code is that the drive could have ended up in a different region code area to the UK and that the drive could be set up to play the region's DVD.

You can normally only change this code a few times before the drive asks you to select a final one. At this point the drive is hardware locked to that choice.

Solutions to this problem are:

1. Set the drive to region 0 (zero). This has the effect of letting the drive play anything.

2. Set the drive to region 2 (europe) and use AnyDVD (or similar) to enable the drive to play any region and also allow other things to happen.

 

The programme you want is DVD & CSS Region Free. I am aware that it is available on bittorrent or emule.

 

Some great info. Very many thanks guys.

Jonny

 

The easiest way to ensure that your DVD player isn't locked to a specific region is to re-flash the firmware (a bit of software within the DVD drive) with one that doesn't have any region coding.
Have a look at the following site: http://forum.rpc1.org/portal.php
Have a browse around and you should be able to figure out how to do it.
Then use a program like DVD Genie to counteract the Windows region protection.

 

wg100 is entirely correct. Its the firmmware on your DVD player that is controlling the region. I believe the Toshiba DVD player allows you a max of 9 region changes before it locks to that region. Changing firmware isn't that easy though and you risk F*cking up your DVD player and voiding your warranty.

Consider a program such as DVD Clone (http://www.clonedvd.net/). I quote CloneDVD is a flexible and easy to use DVD movie copy software. Without special setting, CloneDVD auto removes all protections (CSS, RC, RCE, UOPs and Sony ARccOS) while copying, lets you freely copy all of your DVD movie collections. IT will break the encryption on the DVD and let you copy it to DVD that can be used on any machine. DVD clone is current $69 so £35 approx. If you are use to using Torrents and www.torrentspy you could probably find a version with the license key cracked, but I like to support small developers.

Another alternative is to use something like http://www.share2.com/dvdripper/copyprotecteddvd.htm to copy your protected DVD to avi file on your hard drive. You can compress a DVD to about 700mb in avi file without loss of quality. You could then carry your films around on your hard drive.