Region Free DVD Players, do they give a country select property?

[alkemyst]

My g/f is from Japan and her laptop wouldn't play Monsters Inc last night so I tried to tweak through Japanese XP and found her DVD drive, under properties has a long long list of countries to select (HL-something was the drive name). This was in a Sony VAIO laptop.

We selected USA and watched our movie...is this how the Pioneer 303's and other region-free dvd players work?

Anyone have a list of SCSI ones?

Chris

 

[bacillus]

is this how the Pioneer 303's and other region-free dvd players work?

not really.
if you look at a regionfree drive you will not have a region tab for it under the properties of the drive in device manager.
what you did was to change the region of your drive, something you can only do x4 times before the drive gets locked on to the last region you changed to!
once locked your drive will only play dvds with the region it's locked unto.

 

[rocketbubba]

I am a fan of Japanese monster movies and wanted to be able to watch Region 2 or 3 DVDs, so I started looking into Region-free. Region-free is tricky. There are three things that you have to think about: the OS, the DVD software (if you're using software) and the DVD drive itself - in most cases all three have counters. As for the OS and the DVD software (I'm using WinDVD), I downloaded a nifty little program called DVD Genie that resets the counter in WinDVD and helps reset in Windows (it requires a couple steps). As for the DVD drive, that was a little bit more complicated. I had two choices. First, I could try to flash the "bios" (can't remember what it's called) with a modified set of instructions, but this is risky because if you do it wrong you can kill the drive. Second, I looked for a DVD drive that was manufactured prior to the Region standard that was implemented on 1-1-00. In other words, if you buy a DVD drive that was built before the end of 1999, chances are it's region-free by default because it doesn't check for the region. The beginning of 2000 saw the release of the 8x speed DVD-roms, so I had to settle for less than 8x. I've read that DVD-roms work best if they're atleast 4x speed (for smoothness) so I looked for a decent quality DVD-rom that was between 4x and 8x speed (there's a web site with a long list of all the drives) and I found a nice Samsung 5x drive that was built in 1999. The drive is whisper quiet (the new 16x drives can be a tad loud depending on the model) and works great for movie playback. Best of all - it's totally region free! Go go Godzilla! Hope all this helps.

 

[alkemyst]

Thanks...I will start my Pioneer 303 search soon

 

[Smbu]

Actually, when watching dvd movies the speed of the drive doesn't really matter, because dvd movies only play at 1x speed. Also it is better to just buy an older region free dvd drive if you want to watch movies from different regions. I've been using a Pioneer 303S 6x dvd drive for awhile now and it works great w/movies from several regions that I've tried(regions 1, 2, and 3).

Originally posted by: rocketbubba
I am a fan of Japanese monster movies and wanted to be able to watch Region 2 or 3 DVDs, so I started looking into Region-free. Region-free is tricky. There are three things that you have to think about: the OS, the DVD software (if you're using software) and the DVD drive itself - in most cases all three have counters. As for the OS and the DVD software (I'm using WinDVD), I downloaded a nifty little program called DVD Genie that resets the counter in WinDVD and helps reset in Windows (it requires a couple steps). As for the DVD drive, that was a little bit more complicated. I had two choices. First, I could try to flash the "bios" (can't remember what it's called) with a modified set of instructions, but this is risky because if you do it wrong you can kill the drive. Second, I looked for a DVD drive that was manufactured prior to the Region standard that was implemented on 1-1-00. In other words, if you buy a DVD drive that was built before the end of 1999, chances are it's region-free by default because it doesn't check for the region. The beginning of 2000 saw the release of the 8x speed DVD-roms, so I had to settle for less than 8x. I've read that DVD-roms work best if they're atleast 4x speed (for smoothness) so I looked for a decent quality DVD-rom that was between 4x and 8x speed (there's a web site with a long list of all the drives) and I found a nice Samsung 5x drive that was built in 1999. The drive is whisper quiet (the new 16x drives can be a tad loud depending on the model) and works great for movie playback. Best of all - it's totally region free! Go go Godzilla! Hope all this helps.

 

[Javing]

I've also been alot into HTPC and found "The website" to set your system region free.

All firmwares (BIOS) you'll ever need for DVD drives

Instructions are usually found in readme.txt in the file packages.

Of course you should be carefull when flashing firmwares but I've never had any problems. I've updated both laptop dvd drives and desktop drives.

Cheers
// Erik

 

[rocketbubba]

Yes, that's the website I used. I recently did a clean OS install and accidentally lost some of my web-bookmarks, so I couldn't remember the link. Anyway, good luck!

 

[StanTheMan]

or you can find it here:
http://perso.club-internet.fr/farzeno/firmware/dvd/dvdfi.htm