MissRiaElaine wrote:
On 05/02/2020 00:50, Steve W. wrote:

Most DVD players from stores are region locked to the area they are sold
in. So a unit sold in Japan will not load a US sold DVD, Same if the DVD
was sold in the UK, it will not play on a US player.

Now the DVD drives in a computer are somewhat different but they are
still only set up to allow 5 region changes and will lock on the last
one set. Unlike the store bought DVD players the companies allow the
drives to be reset because people move or buy hardware from companies
outside their home countries and that allows the drives to be sold from
anywhere.

Want to see if that is the case with the one in your machines, Right
click on the drive and look at the hardware properties,
on any windows machine you will find the 5 region warning in there under
DVD Region. If you have a DVD recording drive most machines won't allow
another DVD player to operate either. I suppose for the price of them
you might try it but not sure what will happen.

What might work would be to remove the internal drive or switch it to a
CDROM and use external DVD drives. That might work.

I'm not aware of a way to make a PC's CD/DVD drive region free, but
there are hacks for standalone DVD machines. All my kit is Sony and I
have an IR "dongle" that you point at the machine and it makes it region
free with one button press. I believe there are similar devices for
other brands.



There are multiple ways of doing that with the stand alone players.
There is even a web site showing some of the various hacks, where you
press a sequence of buttons to access a buried menu to turn off region
coding.

For the PC drives it would likely be some coding that either prevents
the region being stored in the firmware or a way that it would overwrite
the region without triggering the counter. Never really thought about it
much because there are not many things I would watch from other
countries. There is even less from the U.S. with all the remakes of
sequels to bad movies these days...

--
Steve W.