1

I can play region 2 dvds perfectly and I thought I could play region 1 dvds as well but I just bought one on ebay and it won't play in vlc, totem, smplayer, mplayer, xine or handbrake.

Apparently if I use regionset to change my dvd player's region, I can only do that 5 times and then it's fixed.

So I'd like to find the way to do it without resorting to regionset.

I tried vobcopy but none of the media players play the vob files created despite the success message.

[Info] Copying finished! Let's see if the sizes match (roughly)
[Info] Combined size of title-vobs: 10240 (0 MB)
[Info] Copied size (size on disk):  1718142976 (1639 MB)
[Info] Everything seems to be fine, the sizes match pretty good ;-)
[Hint] Have a lot of fun!

The video is like a really bad transmission, although the audio is ok.

Where do I go from here?

Tech notes:

adam@gondor:~$ lshw -class disk
*-cdrom
   description: DVD-RAM writer
   product: DVD-RAM UJ875AS
   vendor: MATSHITA
   physical id: 0.0.0
   bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0
   logical name: /dev/cdrom
   logical name: /dev/sr0
   logical name: /media/adam/KPAX
   version: 1.00
   capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram
   configuration: ansiversion=5 mount.fstype=udf mount.options=ro,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=77,iocharset=utf8 state=mounted status=open

I'll check out Matshita.

3
  • Is this a laptop or desktop? Also what model, there are some firmware replacements for select drives.
    – Mateo
    Aug 10, 2014 at 13:41
  • Desktop. See the edit I'm just about to make
    – Adam
    Aug 10, 2014 at 17:19
  • Actually nobody has mentioned the results of vobcopy - is it just tough luck that I can't play the vob files produced? There's nothing more to be said or what?
    – Adam
    Aug 10, 2014 at 17:51

1 Answer 1

1

This seems to be a peri-hardware issue with a few solutions:

  • Don't import DVDs, use local-region ones
  • Buy another DVD drive and set that to your second region
  • Replace the drive with one whose firmware ignores region bits (a multi-region drive)

If you want to get a little dirtier, some DVD drives can have an RPC1 (multi-region) firware written to them but —and I have to stress this— it is extremely model specific and not at all common. Google is your friend here. Chances are the tool for your drive, if it exists, is also only going to run in Windows; do not try Wine for this.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .