DVD and Blu-Ray region unlocking

I unlocked the DVD drive on a windows laptop a few years back and effectively wrecked it. For our TV, we run a region-free DVD player (they are so cheap now, it is hard to justify stuffing around with unlocking). All our  Blu-rays are from our current North American region so no need for unlocking.

On the Mac Mini we run RipIt to rip DVDs to iPad-compatible files. It has no trouble with any region DVDs. The native (OSX?) DVD Player program (which we never use) does though. RipIt must bypass all that guff.

Un-helpful, much? Sorry.

In general as Winky says unlocking DVD multi region coding is relatively easy and a lot of DVD players can be done using a sequence of button pushes which dealers are usually aware of.

Blu-ray is a lot tougher it seems but not impossible.

I have a Denon universal player which has been modded to play both US & UK region coded DVDs and Blu-rays. The dealer sent it to a company that adds additional circuitry based around a bespoke Integrated circuit which allows switching between the two regions simply by pressing either '1' or '2' on the DVD remote while in standby.

This is a typical solution offered by specialist 2nd market dealers which you can probably find via the internet.

Since this is not a original supplier approved mod it invalidates the warranty I guess but i didn't buy my Denon new but 2nd hand so I was not worried

Over here in Europe anyway some dealers offer versions of quality DVD players such as those by Oppo which are region switchable with a markup in retail price and a warranty. I suspect a search in the UK might bring up similar offers.

regards

Geoff

I have been Googling and playing with the five old DVD players in our house, and the two Blu-ray players.

One Panasonic HDD DVD recorder was multi-region out of the box. One very cheap Matsui just need a four digit code. But, I have been unable to unlock any of our Toshiba players (DVD or Blu-Ray). I found only one suggested unlock, for one player, but that didn't work. I'm told the solution in their case is to buy a remote control from the other region.

What I really want is to unlock my Denon Cara Blu-Ray player for DVDs only, as I don't have room for another player at that location, but am satisfied that I have one system working in another room.

Seems odd that some manufacturers, like Toshiba, make it so difficult to unlock, while others make it so easy. Surely, it is a selling point?

Unless I am mistaken it is still official that suppliers must code their players for the specific region they are to be sold in. The fact that quite a lot of region code change arrangements are so simple does indicate how silly that is nowadays.

FWI  a previous model Denon DVD I had required that a special DVD disk had to be 'read' into the player before a code change could be made. Of course the dealer had this disk and once I had purchased the Denon immediately set it to region 'Free' because that was the only way I was prepared to buy it. 

regards

Geoff