It seems that VLC by default is set to play Region B blu-rays. My main question is whether or not this impacts the firmware settings within the actual drive(s).
I have a PC with two blu-ray drives (one BD-ROM and one BD-RW, respectively). On the one hand, I'd ideally like to set one of them to Region A and the other to Region B, in order to maximise the coverage with respect to my personal collection. However, I'm concerned about excessive modifications to the firmware settings. Indeed, if VLC ultimately writes the region code to the drives themselves, I'd hate not being able to play my discs or change the region setting in the future due to being permanently locked out.
My follow up question is: what happens if the region setting in VLC is changed multiple times? Is there a limit to how many changes are allowed, or is this theoretically limitless due to some sort of software workaround in libbluray?
When I looked at the Preferences -> All Settings -> Input/Codecs -> Access Modules -> Bluray menu, there was only one Region setting, and it was already selected to be Region B, which I have been hesitant to modify, lest I start to use up a potentially limited number of changes. Since my computer has two drives, will both of them be forced to recognise only Region B discs by VLC actually overriding the firmware setting? I think I already know the answer to this, since I've been unable to play any Region A-only discs to date, but I just wanted to confirm. Conversely, if I were to modify the firmware such that one drive is Region A and the other Region B, will the VLC setting override them and force both to only play whatever is selected in the above menu?
Last but not least, if I want to be able to play both Region A and Region B discs, it appears my best option is to change the setting in the VLC menu each time I wish to switch regions, assuming unlimited number of changes are allowed, even though I have two drives whose firmwares could be configured to different regions, correct? So long as the firmware is untouched and I can keep switching indefinitely, I don't have a problem with manually wading through the menu each time I wish to change regions.
Thanks for your help!
