With access to a PC, a drive can be flashed and then moved to your Mac. Worse yet, the brilliant programmer who figured out Macintosh ports of PC drive flashing utilities, a guy who used the handle XVI, has retired, and thus no new flashers have been forthcoming.Īll hope is not lost, as there are utilities out there for older drives and for Windows. While there is a website devoted to region free computing ( the Mac section is much smaller than the PC section. I used one such application on my ThinkPads for years and never had to worry about flashing firmware on drives or resetting region counters on the operating system. There are software programs that intercept the DVD before the operating system even sees the region code and tricks it into thinking that it’s Region 1 regardless of what it really is. On a Windows PC, going region free is much easier than on a Mac. Some manufacturers simply won’t do it at all, while others will do it once or twice before closing the door on you. The manufacturer can unlock a locked drive but will charge for the privilege, as this is not a warranty repair (nothing is broken). With a laptop drive, the manufacturer generally allows the region to be changed four times after it’s initially set, at which time it locks forever. I’m not sure where, but somewhere along the way I picked up a Region 2 (UK) copy of Sean of the Dead as well. I think this is baloney, and as someone who travels frequently between the United States and South Korea, I have a mixed DVD collection that is roughly 70% Region 1 and 30% Region 3. This is a non-issue for most people, and it was designed so that video pirates couldn’t buy a DVD released early or with different version in one market and sell illegal copies in another market where the movie was not approved or was released later or in a different version. Region CodesĭVD movies are region coded, so a movie purchased in the United States (Region 1) won’t work on a drive set up for South Korea (Region 3). The drive in the 12″ ‘Books also lacks the ability to burn dual-layer disks.įinally, while this is possibly illegal and definitely voided my warranty, I wanted a drive that I could remove the RPC-2 firmware and replace with RPC-1 firmware, meaning a region-free drive. If these drives did everything they are advertised to do, this wouldn’t be an issue, but the fact is that most Matsushita SuperDrives, though rated at 8x, only burn at 2x unless you have either Apple’s DVD-R media or get very, very lucky on third party media.

2006 – There is one laptop upgrade that gives no performance benefit, but it adds a long-desired feature of frequent travelers, which is a swap of the built-in Combo or SuperDrive for a different model, because Apple’s PowerBooks and MacBooks use Matsushita (Panasonic) optical drives, and it’s, impossible to flash firmware on these drives.

Dvd player for macbook pro