Situation : I felt like viewing my FFXI DVD… so I had to change the region… afterwards… I felt like viewing my SW II : Clone Wars DVD… and I get the message “Your DVD is not configured to play this type of Region.” I go to the DVD settings… and I try to changed them… then I see “You may only change regions a limited number of times. If the number of changes left is 0, you may not change region even if you re-install Win XP or move your DVD drive to another computer.”
So, my DVD drive is stuck on region 2. Joy. Meaning I can’t view any american/canadian DVDs. Double Joy.
So… is there any way I can bypass the stupid lock and get the region to normal ???
Ouch, I hate to be the harbringer of bad news, but the simple answer is “no”.
The region settings are a hard-wired setting, after 5 changes, they become physically set in the drive and cannot be changed.
Edit: It’s a long shot, but you might be able to contact the drive manufacturer and ask them for a replacement, but I doubt they’d give you one, as plenty of warnings are issued to prevent people from changing the setting unneccessarily.
There is another way then. But I don’t want to discuss it here, if you wish I’ll contact you by ICQ on Saturday or Sunday. If you’re smart you’ll find it out and will have it done even before that.
pictures DG watching the FFXI opening over and over again, in absolute ecstasy
There’s a way to alter some DVD-ROM drives so that they either: a) let you change the drive region an unlimited number of times, or b) become region-free. And this can be done without getting inside the hardware. I dunno if it’s the same method Ren is thinking of. It’s kinda weird, because I used this weird little drive-probing program before actually attempting to mess with my drive, and somehow this little proggie made my driver region-free, permanently. Totally accidental, but it kicks ass now. ^^;
I’ll try to find the site that I went to for region-bypassing methods.
I’ve had some freaky experiences with DVDs. For example, I picked up the Cowboy Bebop Session 2 DVD and popped it into my PS2. It gave me a “Disc Read Error” (!), even though every other game and DVD I owned worked. So I put it into my DVD Player in the living room. It worked perfectly.
Don’t know if this has anything to do with Regional Codes, though.
The infamous Disc Read Error on the PS2 is not due to region coding. It has to do with a dirty lens, low voltage setting for the laser, or one of a dozen different problems.
That afterdawn site has some other good DVD-related software, including CDVDinfo, which is the program I used before that miraculously made my drive region-free.
Try using a GameShark…I’ve never actually tried this myself, but a friend of mine who bought a Malice Mizer dvd from Japan used one and the dvd played fine on her PS2.
…well, it was a Gameshark from Europe, I dunno if one from here would work. :hmm:
There’s some freeware out there that lets you reset the number of times you’ve changed the region of your DVD-playing software. I think it’s called DVD Genie . . . but I might be wrong. Maybe you should run a search for that?
