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Comment by stevejalim | Hacker News Reader

Actually, not so... Most DVD players you buy here in the UK are locked to Region 2. You can buy multi-region players or remove the region lock with a code on certain players, but the mainstream are R2 only. Which is a pain.

Indeed, simple region flipping on a PC could have seen Brown sitting down with Citizen Kane (or whatever other 'American classics') quite happily...

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Looks like you are right - I am having trouble tracking when this changed (old news I suppose) but I am pretty sure that when I last purchased a DVD player all those on offer in the UK were multi-region by design or had been adapted before being offered for sale.

That's never been the case.

Not on a mac though, as far as I know. When I had a Powerbook, I couldn't find any way to make it region free. Has that changed?

Depends which drive is in it. Some of the older ones did region checks in hardware so you had to replace the firmware (that was the case on the original SuperDrive 12" PowerBook). On the current MacBooks the region check is in software so VLC works great.

On a Mac you are allowed to change regions 5 times, total, over the lifetime of the computer. So the prime minister could have watched all 25 classic movies, if he didn't alternate with other films in between :-)

I've been able to play European DVDs on my (N. American) Mac using VLC.

This is why I came back here VLC, the free software media player can play region encoded DVDs. I can make sure it DID that sometimes back. Never wanted to check it recently for some reason.

For those who are lazy to google: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

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