I once bought a DVD from outside my region, partly just to see if I could make it work. Regionset is the commandline tool to change your drive’s region setting, but it’s somewhat exciting to use due to the premise that DVD drives usually limit your chances of changing the region to 5 times, so mistakes can be costly. I figured I’d make this note of how it went, because examples of how it should go are reassuring to see prior to executing such delicate operations oneself.
My first issue was with the drive going bonkers (even before using regionset) every time I tried reading the out-of-my-region disc. After that region-compatible discs wouldn’t work either, and as regionset requires a working drive with a working disc in it, it would just fail with a “Please ensure there is a readable CD or DVD in the drive” prompt.
After a cold boot I made sure to insert a region-compatible disc in the drive, and that allowed me to run regionset.
jani@saegusa:~$ sudo regionset /dev/sr0
regionset version 0.1 -- reads/sets region code on DVD drives
Current Region Code settings:
RPC Phase: II
type: NONE
vendor resets available: 4
user controlled changes resets available: 5
drive plays discs from region(s):, mask=0xFF
Would you like to change the region setting of your drive? [y/n]:y
Enter the new region number for your drive [1..8]:1
New mask: 0xFFFFFFFE, correct? [y/n]:y
Region code set successfully!Note that the comma immediately following “drive plays discs from region(s):” indicates my drive was initially unset for any region (as I reckon many of them are, so it’s not unusual).
To make it things even that much more exciting, regionset doesn’t tell you here what regions the numbers correlate to; for that you’ll have to consult the Interwebs or the listing in /usr/share/doc/regionset/README. Above, I set my drive to region 1, which is the North American region, which is where my expatriate DVD is from (I’m from region 2).
Here’s another run without changing the setting, just to show how the “drive plays discs from region(s)” now displays the new region code.
jani@saegusa:~$ sudo regionset /dev/sr0
regionset version 0.1 -- reads/sets region code on DVD drives
Current Region Code settings:
RPC Phase: II
type: SET
vendor resets available: 4
user controlled changes resets available: 4
drive plays discs from region(s): 1, mask=0xFE
Would you like to change the region setting of your drive? [y/n]:n