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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
After a cold boot I made sure to insert a region-compatible disc in the drive, and that allowed me to run regionset.<\/p>\n
jani@saegusa:~$ sudo regionset \/dev\/sr0\r\nregionset version 0.1 -- reads\/sets region code on DVD drives\r\nCurrent Region Code settings:\r\nRPC Phase: II\r\ntype: NONE\r\nvendor resets available: 4\r\nuser controlled changes resets available: 5\r\ndrive plays discs from region(s):, mask=0xFF\r\n\r\nWould you like to change the region setting of your drive? [y\/n]:y\r\nEnter the new region number for your drive [1..8]:1\r\nNew mask: 0xFFFFFFFE, correct? [y\/n]:y\r\nRegion code set successfully!<\/code><\/pre>\nNote 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).<\/p>\n