You should
not use the "change DVD drive region setting" approach on the Wiki unless you have access to firmware for your drive that can reset the region change counter inside your DVD drive. Otherwise once the countdown counter reaches 0- usually after 5 changes- you will lock your drive into the last region forever. Well, until you reflash the firmware anyway ;-)
That might be OK if you are always going to use DVD media from that region, but for many people this is a pain, they want to be able to play DVDs from different regions
As per the info here
http://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_Lang_Docs/html/mplayer/cd-dvd.html section 4.3, RPC1 allows much easier and more reliable access to the data on the DVD. If the DVD drive is new it will be an RPC-2 so it always first checks and if the DVD region does not match its own it will not send the encryption key stored on the DVD to DECSS algorithm (e.g. in libdecss) would normally use to unencrypt it. If your drive is RPC-2 then it won't send the key to your computer, and the software has to try really really hard and
maybe it can decrypt the info on the DVD using "brute force" decryption methods. This is my understanding anyway!
Best approach is to load firmware into your DVD drive that makes it RPC1. This means it does not go through the "check disk is in my region" test.
I added some resources to the DVD page in the wiki.
Summary- do
not change the region code on the drive, instead flash new firmware into your drive that makes it RPC1. If there is no firmware to flash your drive, then buy one that has RPC-1 available. I chose a Pioneer 216 series drive (most pioneers have firmware to change them to RPC1 and these drives are recommended by
http://www.silentpcreview.com as being quiet and reliable. Well, quiet under windows anyway, where there is a utility to set them to quiet/slow mode for playing movies. Hopefully I can do this using Linux too!
I was also looking at Samsung and Liteon drives (Samsung as top choice behind Pioneer 216, probably ahead of earlier pioneer models). Again see the
rpc1.org web site for more info (Links is on LH side of page, scroll down).
As I build up my new system, I will provide more details on flashing the DVD drive with RPC1.
I really, really dislike DRM (and 99% of my media is legally bought!).
