{"id":379,"date":"2007-09-24T00:50:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-24T00:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/?p=379"},"modified":"2007-09-24T00:50:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-24T00:50:00","slug":"379","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/379\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;d like to play out-of-region DVDs on your MacBook Pro, you&#8217;ve been out of luck. The manufacturer of the drive, Panasonic, made it impossible to read data from out-of-region discs, blocking the usual workarounds like VLC. Anyway, it&#8217;s finally been fixed. You&#8217;ll need <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powerbook-fr.com\/dossiers\/dvd_region_free_en_article30.html\">region-free firmware from here<\/a>, plus <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macupdate.com\/info.php\/id\/16366\/dvd-info-x\">DVD Info X<\/a> to make sure it worked, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macupdate.com\/info.php\/id\/13801\/region-x\">Region X<\/a> to manually switch regions.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I can watch DVDs legally purchased in other countries, mostly the UK. Still, if you have a choice, avoid region 1 DVDs. NTSC picture quality is lower resolution than PAL (20%) and the pulldown inherent in the system can cause issues too.<\/p>\n<p>HD? Well, the manufacturers are having a Big Stupid Format War to the benefit of nobody in particular. Most of the industry seems to be backing Blu-ray, and though it&#8217;s technologically better (higher capacity) than HD-DVD, the latter made better decisions on the content side (no region coding, better audio and frame rate support). Blu-ray is more expensive to produce and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/HD_DVD#HD_DVD_.2F_Blu-ray_disc_comparison\">doesn&#8217;t handle 1080p25 footage like HD-DVD can<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Plus, I can author an HD-DVD on a DVD-R today, straight from my HV20, and it plays on my Mac. I&#8217;m stuck. I want the features of HD-DVD with larger Blu-ray size discs. I&#8217;d also like to enjoy the fair use provisions that we all enjoy with DVD, but you don&#8217;t want to get me started on the DRM inherent in both systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;d like to play out-of-region DVDs on your MacBook Pro, you&#8217;ve been out of luck. The manufacturer of the drive, Panasonic, made it impossible to read data from out-of-region discs, blocking the usual workarounds like VLC. Anyway, it&#8217;s finally been fixed. You&#8217;ll need region-free firmware from here, plus DVD Info X to make sure &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/379\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\"><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}