DVD playing woes

[belovedmonster]

Are there any good programs to play DVDs on my computer? Ones that dont give me **** about using a different region or can actually work the DVDROM only features...?

Power DVD will let me play any region but it asks me to change the setup each time i do and it says 3 changes left which to me sounds like after that it wont let me play different regions anymore, plus PowerDVD doesnt wanna work the computer only features to do that i have to use this other program, which is set in playing Region1 now and refuses to play all my PAL disks :\

I need some decent software damnit!

[redlum]

http://www.dvdidle.com/

This is best thing for your problem.

[twister!]

Or just buy a multi-region DVD player - they're not very expensive.

[belovedmonster]

if you are talking about a standalone player thats no help to use the DVDROM computer features is it.

[miker]

mplayer rocks, although I don't know if it's intelligent enough to use DVD-ROM features - but that's usually just URLs n stuff isn't it?

mplayer can pretty much playback anything, although you'll need a DeCSS version to play encrypted DVDs

mplayer is native to *nixes, but i expect a win32 version has been compiled too, just a matter of using google

there's always dvdhelp.com too ...

[miker]

also, i forgot to mention that the region coding is usually present in two places - the playback software (which probably talks to the OS) and the firmware in the drive.

you need to look for an RPC-1 (region free) firmware for your drive, too. RPC-2 means it is region locked (to whatever region)

[redlum]

Originally posted by miker:
RPC-2 means it is region locked (to whatever region)

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Not if you use the software (which you can crack) in my first post. All drives made these days are number region protected - 2