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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Dezone dvd player

pascala - Sep 29, 2006 - 8:02 pm

Hi,

Just bought an imac, and the dvd reader can only be changed 5 times, he thing is i have alot of DVDs from Europe and Australia and I now live in Asia ...

How can i totally dezone it ?

Thanks

philippe99 - Sep 30, 2006 - 4:16 am

Hi and welcome to macosx.com

I would not try to totally dezone the reader..well, this requiers flashing the drive..can be hasardous..and if failed, you have the same opportunity to easily change the drive as you had on the Windows side.


So why not using VLC (www.videolan.org), a free DVD player which can handle much more codecs than Apple one and which does not worry about zoned DVDs

Philippe

pascala - Sep 30, 2006 - 5:36 pm

Thanks for that but I have tried VLC and it doesn't work either. I tried go straight to opening the video ts folder to no avail....

it really seems like their is some sort of locking at the drive level...

philippe99 - Oct 1, 2006 - 2:10 am

I'm not aware of such a lock. What you can try to see if it is really the drive istself is to used MacTheRipper to extract the full DV onto a Video_TS folder on your HD (and by the way getting rid of of zones, Macrovision..) and use VLC (or ApplePlayer) to play the Video_TS folder

Just a remark because surely I do not well understand your "dvd reader can only be changed 5 times" sentence..
Yes, if you have already changed 5 times the zone, you're defintivly stuck on the latest selected zone. And yes, in this case, dezoning the drive is the only solution.

Also pay attention to the fact that, in many case, DVD drives inside mac machines are not sell elsewhere in parts in the world.

An example: the DVD-RW drive of the MBP Superdrive is shown as a Sony DW-D150A.. which is only a sticker put there by Sony...because the drive is a native NEC 063645AGM one.

So, searching a patch to flash the drive's firmware of an Apple drive is not easy and moreover can be dangerous if failed...

... compared to the +/- 100$ for an external free-zone drive you can buy/modified in a PC shop...

... I defintivly would take any risk with a 1500$ machine...

Philippe