Region Free Your Mac DVD Player - OSX 10.5
Here’s the steps to liberate your DVD drive from the 5 region changes it allows. - if you feel this is too much, feel free to just download the offending dvd-rip from the internet and let the movie industry slowly strangle itself to death with pointless regioning.
Warning: Modifying the DVD drive firmware has the potential to void your warranty &/ cause the drive to stop functioning correctly. After researching, I am yet to find a case where this has happened, but thought i’d let you know.
1. Download DVDInfo X: http://rapidshare.com/files/49643080/DVD_Info_X.app.zip
Run this program to work out which type of DVD player you have and what version of firmware you are running.
Download the appropriate patch for unlocking your drive from here: viewtopic.php?f=30&t=43082 (this also features an ‘unpatch’ program to restore the drive to it’s original state)
Download RegionX: http://www.regionx.tk/ (this lets you change the region of your dvd drive once it’s been unlocked).
2. Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
3. Type:
sudo pico /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist
(then press Enter and enter your password at the prompt)
Using the sudo command means you don’t have to mess around with changing permissions. It runs the pico editor in the terminal window with super user permissions, so that it will allow you to edit and save the file.
4. Within the file, you will see these lines. Be sure remember the initial version numbers shown in your file because you will need to restore these numbers later.
<key>ProductUserVisibleVersion</key>
<string>10.5.6</string>
<key>ProductVersion</key>
<string>10.5.6</string>
5. Change both of those values to 10.4.9 (this is necessary as the patching program will not run on 10.5.x so we need to fool it into thinking we are running 10.4.9)
6. Press Ctrl+O. (This may prompt you to either accept or change the filename). Leave as is and press Enter.
7. Leave the terminal open in the background and launch the firmware update. Let it run without interruption. DO NOT RESTART ONCE IT IS FINISHED If this fails, try again.
8. Go back to the terminal window and restore the version numbers to what they were before.
9. Press Ctrl+O and Enter to save the file again, then press Ctrl+X to exit Pico. You may now Quit Terminal.
10. Now you may restart your machine.
11. After restarting, run DVDInfo X to confirm that you’re running an RPC-1 drive. The output should look something like this:
DVD Info X v1.0.2, by xvi (xvi@rpc1.org)
WARNING --- DVD Info X will only list DVD drives that have some WRITE
capabilities, like combos, DVD-R, DVD-RW, etc...
DVD-ROM-only drives will NOT be listed.
WARNING --- You also must eject any inserted medium to list the drive.
Vendor: MATSHITA
Model: DVD-R UJ-85J
Firmware: FBZ8
RPC-1 (region free)
If that is correct, proceed. If not, other than trying again, I can’t help you.
12. Launch RegionX. This will prompt you to confirm that you’re running an RPC-1 drive.
13. Restore the number of changes left to 5, and then choose the region of your choice.
14. Finally, try playing DVDs from different regions in VLC or other DVD Player to make sure it all works. RegionX can be now used to change the dvd region to whichever region you need, without affecting the number of changes required.
