The old DRM problem

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › The old DRM problem

Rickles

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#130988 4-Oct-2013 15:08

I appreciate that Microsoft, as an American company, wants to play nice with the music and motion picture industry, but the DRM matter does cause computer users inconvenience when the DVD zone/region code becomes set on one code number.
Other than the USA, where multi-region DVD players and the like are deemed illegal for retail sale, people around the globe collect legitimate DVD's from many sources in order to satisfy their viewing interets and pleasures, and after a few regional changes to their DVD drive settings, suddenly they are stuck with a stack of useless disks when using Windows Media Player!

Of course one may -
    - install and use literally any other third-party video/media player (software)
    - use a program to re-set or remove zone codes from the DVD drive (hardware)
    - install and use a 'region killer' type application and all is well, including the use of WMP, but many users are not au fait with these workarounds.

Has anyone heard of a program or means of resetting the DVD drive region/counter within WMP? Even if this 'lock' is not a Registry type of setting, it is afterall only rock and roll, sorry, I mean software.

B1GGLZ

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#908076 4-Oct-2013 19:18

In the early DVD days I purchased a Creative DXR3 systen which was a hardware card for decoding and a 6x DVD drive which surprisingly was region free. So far it's the only drive I've ever come across that is region free and I still have it. It was very handy as most of my discs at that time came from Canada or USA where they were much cheaper.
As you say plenty of software to overcome the region problem but nothing I know of that would work from within WMP. I doubt that such software exists.
These days I just have 2 drives in my PC. One set on Region 1 and the other on 4. Never could understand why they bothered with Regions and Zones as there are so many ways to bypass the restrictions. Will probably have to use third party software if I update to a BluRay drive but then BluRay discs sourced from UK now are same zone as NZ or Zone Free and generally cheaper too.

freitasm

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#908081 4-Oct-2013 19:21

You will find there are lots of "unlocked" firmware around for most of the DVD drives. This worked for me in the past, but I haven't had a DVD for ages, and my last two laptops didn't have a DVD drive anyway.

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justinbyoung

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#908913 6-Oct-2013 20:39

AnyDVD HD http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvdhd.html is a good solution. Without it I don't think I would watch anything directly off optical disk.