Big problems with VLC and new iMac G5

[WickEd]

Hi all.

I'm a proud new owner of the iMac G5 20" and the first thing I wanted to do was run some nice crisp DVDs across the huge screen! Of course, it was soon I found out about the whole "region lockout" thing on the SuperDrives, and my whole world came crashing down. I have DVDs from everywhere across the world being a big traveller and Internet buyer.

Anyway, when I realised VLC offered region-free playing I was pretty ecstatic. I still hadn't assigned my drive a region, and tried to play a simple episode of The Office. Wouldn't play - it just attempted to load the disc and the title went back to "VLC media player". I thought that perhaps I needed to assign it a particular region to play a movie from anywhere, so I gave my drive a region, and of course the DVD played fine (both in VLC and Apple's own DVD Player). Then I tried a foreign DVD and it had the exact same effect in DVD (asking for a region change) but also in VLC. Why is that? It simply could not play. I went into Open Disc..., browsed to the inserted DVD mount and opened it. It says "rdisk1@1/1" in the player, gives up, then displays "VLC media player" as though it's default.

I then tried an actual DVD movie, also foreign to the Region I had set, and it did the exact same thing, producing error message "dvdread: read failed for -1/4 blocks at 0x01".

I can get more information from the ouput error logs if you need.

Please tell me what's going on - I really can't stand not being able to watch DVDs on this new 20 inch behemoth! It's killing me and I've heard that VLC "completely dismisses regions" and plays everything fine. Is my computer screwed?

Thanks in advance guys!!
Edward.

[chain]

i also just got G5 1.8 SD. Same DVD region problem...
have you tried optical output? Does it output 5.1 dolby surround in vlc? Or when playing dvds with dvd player?

PS i tried one dvd in my mac and dvd player asked me to select region. then i just copied VIDEO_TS folder from dvd to HD and watched it from there ( with dvd player, without selecting region )

[The DJ]

Newer Macs no longer allow software to read DVD's raw if the right region is not set (or something like that). Therefore our DVDCSS decryption library is useless in this case.

[Guest]

Your best bet is to probably get a cheap external Firewire DVD to play DVDs from one region and your internal drive to play DVDs from another.