Different regional code on external drive

I would like to keep my original regional code on my mac set to 2 (europe) and reset the regional code of a external dvd drive to 1 (north america).
I buy several dvd's from several different countries and would like to watch them all on my mac.
Would this be possible, or will my OS stop me from doing this ?
That nice flat DVD player, designed for the Macbook Air would be nice.
Thanks for your help.

I have an external HP DVD optical drive that I changed to Region 2 so I can play and backup my Region 2 DVDs and play them on my standalone DVD player.
I don't understand the problem. You insert a Region 2 DVD into your external drive and you are then asked to reset the Region code. Just do it.
Follow the instructions.
On my ancient HP drive, I had to use a PC to change the Region code, but most newer drives will recognize a Mac for the Region change.
Message was edited by: nerowolfe

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Region code with 2 drives?

I was wondering if it was possible to set a different region code for each of the drives in the Mac Pro - perhaps by installing DVD Player twice?
I lived in the US for many years, now live in the UK, so I have DVDs from both places and would love to avoid having to use VLC player.
Any advice?

When I put a DVD in the second drive, it asked me to set the region.
I now have the top drive set to region one, and the bottom to region two.
What I haven't yet tried, is to open DVD player with the dvd in the to drive, then eject that and put a disc in the bottom drive. Not sure if that will confuse the application.

Exporting different regions codes from imovie

Does imovie allow you to export video and burn to DVD with different region codes. I live in Canada and would like to make a copy of my movie for someone living in Europe.

Being from Germany and thus often confronted with the PAL/NTSC issue:
Over the last at least 10 years the majority of locally sold DVD-Players and TV-Systems are multisystem. So the risk of someone not being able to play back an NTSC-DVD is there, but chances are a lot higher that it works.
To my knowledge, the majority of DVD-Players sold here even allow for playback of an NTSC-DVD to a PAL-only TV-set.
I personally think it is fairly safe at this time, only to worry about the system issue (not saying it is not there at all) once you get feedback, that someone is in fact not able to playback NTSC-material.
Dirk

DVD Drive Region Code.... help?

On my dad's iBook G4 almost every dvd I get from the store comes up with the error message "*The DVD-Video disc region code does not match the drive region code.* (You cannot change the region code for your drive)"
I remember a while ago one of our relatives visited from England and probably played a dvd or two from England so I'm assuming that's how this happened. Is there any way to change the drive's region code? I'm guessing re-installing the OS might do it, but that would be last resort if my dad even considers it. I've tried VLC and others, but the OS seems to make the rules.... any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks:)

As per the conditions imposed on the rest of the world by the MPAA mafia, a DVD drive can be set to play DVDs from one of the 9 regions ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVDregioncode ) for a maximum of 5 times by the end-user. As a backup, there is a 'service reset' that can be used up to 4 times to reset that count, which means that a DVD drive's region can be changed an absolute maximum of 20 times.
The 'service reset' is used by service centers, etc., knowing that the unilluminated users will usually exhaust their 5-count accidentally, like in this case. I'd like to think that a Genius in an Apple Store o an Apple Service Center should be able to carry such a reset out. There are also utilities in the wild that allow you to do this, so you might want to Google your way around and see if you can find one for your specific Mac and DVD drive model. Note that this service reset is perfectly legal, does not invalidate any warranty or incur in the wrath of any law enforcement agency.
Reflashing the firmware on the drive with microcode hacked to be region-free also solves the problem. However, from the technical point of view, this is risky as any failure in the process will result in dead drive with no warranty and, from the legal point of view, breaks scads of different national laws making you liable for prosecution (if caught).

Drive region codes

ok, so i've recently purchased some movies from overseas, and as usual they're in a different region code. i've changed my drive's region code the three times allowed... am i pretty much out of luck?
i just want to watch harry potter!

it seems to be possible to change the DVD zone 5x but last time I tried on a new intel iMac I had an error nb 1007
I never changed this zone code before, so it should be possible.... but it is not. I can only watch zone 1 DVD ( I would like to change for 2 )
Does anyone has an idea to correct that ?
PS : I tried to read the DVD with VLC for OSX intel but I have no picture & no sound. Only the DVD name in the VLC pannel
PS2 :: I tried with many DVD... and it is the same pb

DVD Regional Codes can only be changed 5 times? Why?

I recently purchased a MacBook Pro in the U.S. and brought it to Japan where I currently reside. I have DVD's from the states that I want to watch along with DVD's that can be rented here in Japan. When I inserted a DVD into the drive from Japan with a regional code of 2, I was informed that the regional codes can only be changed 5 times and on the 5th time, that code becomes permanent. What is up with that? And is there any way to switch back and forth between various regions without a limit? I don't understand.

This is to stop people circumventing the region code system by simply changing the region code of their DVD player. In my opinion, this is an "anti-piracy" measure that does more to annoy people than it does to stop piracy.
With all other computer drives, you can actually change them 25 times; after every fifth time though, you have to take it to a dealer to have it reset. Apple don't allow this and limit you to five times. After the fifth time, they will not reset it, and you are stuck with it. I would only change it if I moved somewhere with a different region code.
VLC can function as a multi-region DVD player on some drives, allowing you to play disks from any region, regardless of the region coding of your player. It works on my iMac, so I would imagine that there is a good chance it will function as such on your MacBook Pro.

Plausible deniability on an encrypted external drive?

Hello,
I would like to use an external drive as a backup to store my personal data. As I don't care about Windows compatibility, LUKS seems good for that.
But my problem is to encrypt my critical data (like bank details), where a nested hidden volume seems a good option. Arch still has the "good" version of TrueCrypt, but its strange end of life announcement make me wonder if it's still good to use.
LUKS' author doesn't plan to add this yet, listing a number of reasons but a comment (#18) seems to tell it's feasable.
So what are my options if I want to do that?
Thanks.

In regards to plausible deniability, it's possible to go even further if you're willing to roll up your sleeves...
You can do something like creating a "normal" partition containing stuff you don't care too much about, partially spanning the disk. Then, in the unallocated space beyond that partition, pick a region of sectors to use as the encrypted volume, and set up a loop device to access them.
losetup -o [offset in bytes] --sizelimit [size in bytes] /dev/loop0 /dev/sdX
Then, set up dm-crypt in *plain* mode on that loop device (plain mode means no header, so the encrypted data is theoretically indistinguishable from random garbage):
cryptsetup --cipher=${chosen_cipher} open --type=plain /dev/loop0 ${some_name}
which will make the decrypted device show up at /dev/mapper/some_name. This command prompts for a passphrase to be entered. note this command has do be re-done the same each time you need to mount the decrypted storage. You can also use a keyfile, by adding
--key-file=somefile --key-size=${size_of_key_in_bits}
to the cryptsetup command before "open". The mapper device can then be closed with
crypsetup close ${some_name}
and the raw loop device removed with
losetup -d /dev/loop0
If you do it this way, both the opening commands must be done manually when you want to access the encrypted storage. Additionally you'll need to remember the offset and size of the region on the external drive that is your encrypted data. However, if you overwrite the disk with random data before starting, there's no way to tell the encrypted data is there just by looking at the disk - hidden amongst the random data. The idea of the normal partition before it is to act like a decoy, so you could claim the "unallocated" space is just where you want to add a new partition later.

Backing up your mac to external drive and how to access individual files

I have managed to back up the information on my computer to a external drive as a whole but need to access different files, projects so that i can then delete them from my computer to save space. how do I access the different files on my external drive???

You CAN access the backed up file from a time machine backup. Just attach the external drive you used for time machine backups to your notebook and then Start Time machine (First under preference - slide the switch to "off" so it does not start an automatic backup right then) Once you open the backup files in Time Machine on your Notebook you can navigate back to older backups to get to that file. (Even if you've deleted it on your notebook after having backed up that file)
NOW - I would recommend having another back up, like the other poster, before you delete the file from your notebook. Redundancy is a good thing. The way time machine works is that over time as your external drive begins to fill it will delete the oldest backup(s) and you could potentially loose that file forever.
I have two other back ups - I have a Super Duper (exact) cloned version of my MBP on a second ext. hard drive. Now, this would not work for you since you want to delete that file from your MBP. Since it is an exact copy if you delete that file from your notebook and then go back to do a back up with Super Duper it would delete that file on the cloned version on your ext. hard drive (too keep them exactly the same). There may be other settings to avoid this, but I generally just use it as a clone. I also have a 3rd mobile hard drive where I set up folders for files I want to keep forever and just drag and drop those onto this drive.
You can cut down on having too many ext. drives if they have a big enough capacity by partitioning them in Disk Utility. (i.e one big drive with a partition for Super Duper and another for standard backups)
Hope that helps a bit.
Thanks.
Mark

Continually have to Set Region Code for DVD Help?

LG GSA-H50L.
This drive, so I've discovered, is not supported (Disk Utility says Burn Support: Unsupported).
Every time I put in a DVD, it says that the region code of the drive and the disk don't match (Drive is Region 1, disk is region 2). I lets me change the Region code, but next time I put in a DVD...same thing all over again.
Oddly, it always states "You can change the Region code 5 more times"
Any ideas?

If your LG doesn't work, give the Pioneer a try. Before I bought it, I researched many other's experience with it, and it seems that the 115D is the winner. Just thought I'd help with additional options for you. In my humble opinion, I don't think it's wise to spend so much time fussing with a $30-$50 DVD drive vs. getting a new one and getting the Mac back on track for work/fun.

Drive Region Code different from iBook to PowerBook??

I am visiting Germany from America and i have a Powerbook G4 and my girlfriend has a iBook which we purchased at the same time (before X-Mas) in america. now i know about drive region code settings and their purpose (although i dont undestand why they cant be changed as many times as needed, only 5), but my powerbook prompts me to change it when i input a German DVD and my girlfriends plays them no questions asked?? what is the deal there?? thanks

Hey Mike,
glad you got it figured out
You can download VLC from here:
VLC Media Player
This article might also be helpful for you:
Region Free DVD Playback with VLC

Switching the DVD drive region code - Is there a workaround?

Hi - would appreciate a confirmation or helpful hints how to circumvent the regional settings.
I understand from the Apple doc, http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60183, that the regional coding is set in the firmware of the drive and not linked to the player (as I had apparently incorrectly surmised). If this is the case, then installing an additional player such as the VLC media player for Mac OS X (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html) to use for say Region 1 discs, and maintaining Apple's DVD Player set for Region 2 discs would not prevent the drive from freezing the 5th time a different region coded disc is slid into the drive.
Right?
If so, the only work around would be to install an external DVD drive to set to an alternative region, right? Or does somebody know a cute way to disable the firmware coding and set the drive to multiple regions. This must be possible because DVD players are available commercially which have been set to region code 0.
I have 2 changes left ... before the big freeze. Thanks

To Apple Discussions!
It has been reported that VLC overrides the 5 region code option. You will need to read their documention on their website. Otherwise................
You can change the computers region "only 5 times". Then it's locked in the 5th version/region (until you erase your HD & start all over.).

Error Code -36 While Writing to External Drive

I have a 2.16GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro with the 100GB 7200 RPM HDD and 1GB 667 RAM. I am trying to use my MBP with a Western Digital 250GB MyBook Essential external HDD connected via USB 2.0.
The external HDD used to be formatted with FAT32 (I was unaware) and I could read and write small files to the drive with no problem. However, when I tried to copy my iTunes folder to the drive (21.7 GB) I would always get an error soon after the transfer began. The error message reads:
The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "08 Bottle of Blues.mp3" could not be read or written. (Error Code -36).
The message will always come up on the same file. If I delete the file mentioned in the error message, the error will still come up after about the same amount of time has elapsed, but just on a different file.
Recently, I learned that the external drive was FAT32 so I formatted it with Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I still get the same error.
I have tried using Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0b5 and SuperDuper! 2.1.4 and neither application can complete the transfer--using the Mac OS Extended file system. CCC gives me the error:
15:45:02 Error: asr: could not copy /./Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app/Contents/Resources/no.lproj/ScriptEditorHelp/gfx/sedebug.jpg; Input/output error
15:45:02
15:45:02
15:45:05 ccc.sh: The restore operation failed, Error code: 98
SuperDuper! gives me the error:
| 04:00:49 PM | Error | ditto: /Users/caseyhancock/.Trash/Office 2004 for Mac Test Drive/Office/Fonts/./MS Mincho.ttf: Input/output error
AppleCare support hasn't been able to help me, and I feel like I've searched exhaustively for information about Error Code -36. If anyone could shed some light on my problem and help me backup/copy files to this external HDD I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance.
MBP 15" 2.16 1GB 100GB 7200RPM Mac OS X (10.4.7)

In my experience, it was a BAD EXTERNAL DRIVE...
sometimes they are bad (and the one I had was a external USB 120 GB Western Digital) due to fall, or something, and you can format and they work, but they have a place on the disk that is just bad, and freezes the external disk, and it is unable to accept commands.
A way of testing this, is to write to the entire disk..
Doing this will kill the entire drive, but will allow you to verify that you can write to the whole drive... (in addition to erasing everything on it.. )
make sure the disk is mounted in the finder.. and give it a uniqe name... so it will be easy to distinguish in the commands below.
THE FOLLOWING IS INTENDED AS A GUIDE. VERIFY YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING BEFORE YOU DESTROY VALUABLE DATA..
open the terminal program:
type the following:
df -h
you should see all the disks that the are connected to the system. a sample of the output is below:
it does not look so nice, as the font is not monospaced, but on the terminal window it lines up nicely:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 186G 124G 62G 67% /
devfs 97K 97K 0B 100% /dev
fdesc 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev
<volfs> 512K 512K 0B 100% /.vol
automount -nsl [182] 0B 0B 0B 100% /Network
automount -fstab [198] 0B 0B 0B 100% /automount/Servers
automount -static [198] 0B 0B 0B 100% /automount/static
/dev/disk1s1 466G 463G 2.4G 99% /Volumes/wd-usb-250
in my case the last disk is a WD mybook that I called "wd-usb-250"
now, in the finder, unmount the disk and make sure nothing is accessing it...
notice that the computer thinks that the disk is connected via the path:
/dev/disk1s1
VERIFY THAT THIS IS THE SAME FOR YOU.. IF NOT THEN USE THE APPROPRIATE DRIVE..
this next step will go and write zero's to the whole drive.. if you are not so adventures you could just read from the entire disk.. if there are major problems then the read will not work either.
SO: to write in the terminal do the following: THIS WILL KILL THE DISK YOU ARE TESTING... INSURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING...
NOTICE HOW IN THE COMMAND BELOW I HAVE /DEV/DISK1 NOT /DEV/DISK1S1.
TRUNCATE YOUR DEVICE ACCORDINGLY...
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk1 bs=16m
let it run till it either quits because of a i/o error or says it reached the end of the device.. if it reached the end of the device the device just had zero written to it..
it at the end will tell you how many 16Mb chunks of zero it wrote.. (this is assuming that your disk is a even multiple of 16Mb).
now to test that the device actually works, we can read the whole thing. by issuing the following command in the terminal.
dd if=/dev/disk1 | hexdump -C
you should get an output that looks like this (with the records being changed to be the size of your disk divided into 16 Mb chunks...:
00000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
16777216 bytes transferred in 23.666544 secs (708900 bytes/sec)
Sorry for the long post, and hope this is not too technical but helps.
S.
Macbook, Macbook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.9) + virt machines, linux, xp, vista 2 gb RAM 200 Gb

Error Code -36 writing to external drives

Hello all,
I was working in Final Cut Pro with a project, and I updated to 10.5.7 (dumb, I know). The next time I tried to open my project, it returned the message "The project is unreadable, or may be too new for this version of Final Cut."
I restarted the computer,
trashed preferences from Username>Library>Preferences>com.apple.finalcutpro.plist,
attempted to open backup files of the project (stored on my Macintosh HD, when the working project files are stored on a different internal media drive),
connected my laptop (running 10.5.6) and moved the project file (and backups) to the laptop, and attempted to open with it,
attempted to connect external drives to move the project files, and try from the laptop that way and I started receiving two errors: "The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in 'Test_movie.mov' could not be read or written. (Error code -36), or another error about file names being too long.
I booted to the OSX disk, and ran disk utility, repairing all internal drives, and repairing disk permissions for my OSX drive.
I tried firewire 400 & 800.
I formatted the external drives, and still received the message (actually, after formatting, the message changed from the "names too long" to the "Error Code -36" I listed above).
I don't know what else I can try. Older FCP projects as well as all types of documents and images seem to open just fine. Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks,
Lawrence

I was getting the same "-36" error while trying to backup to a Lacie firewire external drive.
I had a lot of people telling me to re-format, erase, reinstall, run utility programs ... yada, yada, yada.
First off, test to see if it is the connection type (firewire). I reconnected the offending external drive via USB, restarted the drive and ... BINGO! ... all transfers went perfectly.
Once i knew it was the firewire connection and not the drive itself i simply unplugged my iSight camera (the only other firewire device connected to my machine), reconnected my external drive via firewire and the problem is now corrected.
Firewire buses seem to be very finicky things ... i would suggest eliminating all firewire devices from the machine (except, of course, the external drive you're trying to transfer to) and see if the problem goes away.
Like i said, i simply unplugged my iSight camera and the transfer to my external drive went perfect and my transfer rates went from an average of 4MB/sec to over 19MB/sec.
P.S. BTW - prior to the error and after i corrected the error by unplugging the iSight camera, my internal and external drives all checked out 100% on Disk Utility, Disk Warrior and TechTool Pro.

Region code - External DVD burner

Hi all,
Due to the region code issues on the newer Mac's, I bought an external 5.25" drive case, and transplanted a DVD burner from my donor Windows machine/doorstop.
A strange observation, I put a region 2 disc in the player and Tiger told me I can change the region code 4 more times... I guess some of this region code trouble is in the OS - I thought it was all burner. Anyway, I can still do a data rip.
I used Mac The Ripper (MTR) to rip a British DVD. I want to burn it onto a blank DVD so I can watch it on the Mac. However, the file is over 7gb.
Any idea how I can compress this and maintain the chapter structure? The DVD is a series of shows and I'd like to skip chapters, or be able to select a specific one.
So far, the external DVD option is a hit with me.
Steve

Well, dual-layer is just that. A semi-transparent layer on top of another layer. The problem is that older drives developed before the recordable dual-layer standard typically don't recognize the disk type, and even a few sport hadware that simply can't accomodate it.
This is true mostly of older hardware. Most players and drives made since the 1st quarter of 2004 will handle dual-layer media alright. Dual-layer recordable DVD media has been out since 4th quarter 2003.
There's nothing Mac-specific about it.

HT2397 Is region code is recorded in the DVD drive? So, if I have two Apple USB SuperDrive, I can have two separate region code?

If the region code is recorded in the DVD drive, then I can purchase two Apple USB SuperDrive to play different region DVD ?

To Apple Discussions!
It has been reported that VLC overrides the 5 region code option. You will need to read their documention on their website. Otherwise................
You can change the computers region "only 5 times". Then it's locked in the 5th version/region (until you erase your HD & start all over.).

Different regional code on external drive

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