[clug] Philips DVD+RW SDVD6004 in Dell notebook

[Andrew Over]

On Sun, Sep 07, 2003 at 03:08:48PM +1000, Brett Worth wrote:

> My question is:  If I'd just left it alone would I have had a region free
> DVD player?  Or would the drive have forced a region to be set before it
> would allow any DVD to be played?

It really depends on the drive (and I'm not familiar with the one you
mention).  On some drives (I think they refer to them as RPC1) I believe
the region code is largely controlled through software on the PC.  This
is A Good Thing (tm).

Most newer drives however implement RPC2 where the region is controlled
by the drive's firmware.  I believe these just won't work until you set a
region (which can only be changed 5 times).

However, the region setting is entirely irrelevent when using libdvdcss,
since it just bypasses the region setting, and decodes the CSS itself.
At least it lets me happily watch region 4 on the RPC2 region 1 DVD
player in my TiBook :-P

Cheers,
--Andrew