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Help with playing various regions on a laptop

I'm just experiencing a situation I've read of here but not had to cope with myself. How do you play various region DVDs on a NEW laptop? (This is running Mac OSX 10.7.5)
VLC isn't cutting it (unlike our old laptop), and I'm at a loss.
We have a region-free DVD player, but our TV just broke too.
Is my best bet to connect the region-free DVD player to the laptop somehow, or is it possible to hack this silly laptop somehow?

It's very odd that VLC isn't working for you. I think your only other software option is finding a different third party player that does work. I'm not familiar with any other than VLC but I'm sure a little google research on your part would give you some options.

From what I understand, the Mac DVD drive issue is a firmware thing and you mess with that at your peril.

I don't know about Macs, but most DVD players for PCs allow you to change the region up to five times, at which point they are locked at the final selection. A Google search will bring up a lot of articles about how to do this.

You only get to change the regions a few times on the laptop (this includes macs) so I wouldn't mess with that. Normal options might include buying a cheap portable USB player and changing its region code to the one you want. Of course you might want to research that and make sure its not locked down in some way. As far as your regular dvd player if you don't have the right inputs and outputs on both devices (player and computer) plus the software then its not going to work. As far as the cheap option like a hack that I know nothing about. It would probably require hacking the firmware on the dvd drive, just like some region free players are hacked, and screw that up and you might be without a working dvd player on your mac.

Thanks to trusted forumites for responding.
Two options, I think.
1) The USB player (properly researched!)
2) Buying a new bloody TV.
I hate TVs. They're so big. But a should give that option thought, since I would like to be able to play VHS tapes again too.

Anyway, thanks to all above. chu!

You could try BlazeDVD, that's what I use for watching my Australian imports and it works just fine for me. It's free, and bypasses region coding like VLC without changing your region so you don't have to worry about that. Don't know if it's Mac compatible though.

The only quirk I've noticed with it is that sometimes the clickable "hot spots" will be slightly off of where they are supposed to appear. They usually appear above the text they belong to for some reason,.

Thank you! Unfortunately, as you suspected, there doesn't seem to be a Mac version.
I've been reading about this and there's something I want to try on this machine (not messing with firmware!)...

Ahh! Nothing I try works. Back to square one.

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Forum - View topicHelp with playing various regions on a laptop

Forum - View topic
Help with playing various regions on a laptop