I got a new Macbook a couple of weeks ago and stuck a region 2? (europe) dvd in the magic slot and was greeted by the message – please select region, you can change region 4 more times. Now I moved to Australia a while back and have a shed load of UK dvds and quite a few aussie ones too so only getting 5 chances to change region seems a bit shit. Is there a way of unlocking the mac dvd player or do I just need to download a different player?

Not sure how to unlock it, but it is related to the drive rather than the playing software, I think. So really it is some way of unlocking it that you need to find.

This might help you get started though.

Get your reading head on and pop over to here.. Unfortunately the link Tracker posted is 3 years old, so it will not apply to current drives/firmware.

if you cant make it region 0 and only have 5 changes you could change it to aussie mode and use DVD shrink to copy the dvd’s with no region code on the copy.

edit – except you might not be able to use DVD shrink cos its a mac. Bound to be similar software though.

You’re probably out of luck. Apple are dreadful for this, it’s one respect in which they’re much worse than Microsoft et al, because they have almost total control over the hardware they use.

In theory, you need to 1) apply a region-free firmware to your DVD drive, and 2) use Region X to remove the OS X region restrictions.

In practice, there aren’t any region-free firmwares available for the DVD drives used in the Macs I have owned, and you will probably find the same thing with yours. You can start with a Google for the relevant drive model and make (shown in System Information) and see if there’s anything available.

The only time I managed to read DVDs out of region on a Mac was using a region-free USB DVD drive in combination with Region X, but that was on Leopard not Snow Leopard. Even then I ended up having to use VLC to actually watch things, DVD Player wouldn’t work. I have no idea if it will work on 10.6. Probably not.

Good luck though! Please post if you figure out a better way of making it work…