How to Use VLC to Play DVDs from Other Regions

[jacquesdubois]

This seems to work for me-

My drive, a Pioneer DVR-109, is RPC1 and set to Region 1. The way I get DVDs from other Regions to work with VLC is under the CDs& DVDs section in the System Preferences I turned the auto play feature to off for video DVDs. This way you can just open the DVD in VLC and it works.

And now with the new version of VLC, the audio on DVDs consistently works!

Despite this, if you try to play a Region 2 disk with Apple's DVD player it gives you a warning dialog telling you that the disk doesn't match and gives you the option to change the region of the drive.

Can someone else try this to confirm that it works?

[xiaodidi]

I appreciate your posting your experiences (I also appreciate myself for providing some feedback, which is unusual for this forum).

The behaviour with RPC1 drives is normal: VLC will play any title, even if the region is not set at all. Different story with RPC2 drives: only a few region-locked titles may play if the region is not set at all, and none will play if the drive is set to a different region.

However, with RPC2, at least VLC will play region-free DVDs on a pristine Mac, while DVD Player -- to Apple's shame -- still asks to set the drive region. So you have the absurd situation that you can't play any region-free DVDs if you don't want to set the region (and why should you?), unless you have VLC.

I am curious about the audio with 0.8.4. With 0.8.2 I was able to get true 5.1 sound with OS 10.3.9, but not with 10.4.2.

If anybody reads this and has experience with VLC and M-Audio Sonica Theater, please do post a few lines about your setup.

Thanks!

[The DJ]

The multichannels audio support in VLC was developed especially for the M-Audio Sonica.

There are some small issues in the channel ordering of the speakers with the default M-Audio settings, and you need to set this yourself in the Audio Midi Setup utility. But it works. I tested it on all both 10.3.9 and 10.4 with all the *.* channel setups.

[xiaodidi]

The multichannels audio support in VLC was developed especially for the M-Audio Sonica.

There are some small issues in the channel ordering of the speakers with the default M-Audio settings, and you need to set this yourself in the Audio Midi Setup utility. But it works. I tested it on all both 10.3.9 and 10.4 with all the *.* channel setups.

I can't wait to try it out!