The VideoLAN Forums

Hi. I am new to VLC and this forum, so my apologies if I am posting a question in the wrong place. I use VLC 1.1.3 on a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.6.4. The MacBook Pro has a Matshita DVD-R UJ-868 drive. I recently bought the MacBook Pro in the USA.

I have a collection of region-1, region-2 and region-4 DVD's. When I insert region-1 DVD's, VLC plays them just fine. When I insert region-2 or region-4 DVD's, however, VLC will not read them. The DVD's also do not appear in the Finder window, so I assume there is something in the Matshita drive firmware that is preventing VLC from "seeing" the DVD's. I have heard that one can "flash the firmware", but I really do not want to go down that path. I'd rather just purchase an external DVD drive that is region free. Can anyone recommend a specific brand and model?

Thank you

I haven't been dealing much with non-region-1 drives recently, so any useful information I may have is out of date, but I will attempt to suggest something in case no one else answers:

I believe the Mac will work quite happily with any external USB or Firewire HD DVD player, so it is simply a matter of buying a drive you like, see if it works and take it back if it doesn't. Also, if you have a local computer store where you can buy your drive from, then try asking the sales people. In my past experience, in countries where having region-free drives counts the sales people tend to know some of the options. Another approach is looking at the drives that region free have firmware updates available and then buy based on that.

Additionally, a quick search turns up this article (dated 2006): http://lowendmac.com/fishkin/06/0912.html

One question: does the bundled DVD software "see" the disk? Also, is it visible under /Volumes , when looking from the terminal? For region-2 and region-4 disks that can be seen in the Finder, can you play them if you simply point VLC to the VIDEO_TS folder of the disk or simply specifying the device of the disk? Also, ensure you have the latest version of VLC, since I believe there was a small DeCSS bug that was fixed at some point recently.