Unable to play international DVDs

[breyogue8118]

I have a macbook and for some reason I cannot play international DVDs. My computer was purchased in New York and VLC will play American DVDs only. I am living in Australia currently. Sometimes it will play the first few seconds of an Australian DVD, but it soon says "file reading failed: VLC could not read the file"
Not sure what this means as it plays my American DVDs without any problems. I have reinstalled it several times and tried various DVDs. Really want to watch my DVDS, but don't want to recode my Mac DVD player. What should I do to fix it?

[ajmas]

Welcome to region encoding. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code

The limitation is on the drive. The are ways to remove this limitation, but it requires changing the firmware and doesn't come without risks.

BTW What effect does simply playing the disk using the VIDEO_TS option (pointing to the VIDEO_TS) folder?

[breyogue8118]

ok. I don't know much about toying with set computer features. I tried VIDEO_TS, to the same effect as everything else I have tried. Although I know about video encoding, I have never had a computer that was limited before. If I leave it as is, VLC is basically useless to me. I have doubts about playing with things that may void my warrenty or damage my software, but I may choose to do it anyway as I travel frequently and am currently an international student. How do I remove the limitation and what are the risks specific to my 2008 black macbook. It has mostly basic software and is current in all mac programs.

[ajmas]

Just curious did you try VLC 1.1.0-rc? What does Apple's DVD player application present as behaviour?

[breyogue8118]

No. I think I have 1.0.5 Goldeneye? Apples DVD player asks to change the code. If I do not change it, it ejects the DVD.

[roger jonsson]

As said, this differs from dvd-drive to dvd-drive. On my old G4, VLC could play any region discs. On my Macmini 1.83 VLC could not bypass the hardware protection of the drive and would only play the region set by DVD-player (limited number of changes until the dvd-drive got permanently locked to last setting). On my newer 2.53GHz Macmini VLC again plays any region, bypassing the region setting on the dvd-drive.

In short: -It has to do with the dvd-drive built in region protection (possibly combined with the OS).