blu-raydvdregional settings
I have a combined DVD / HD-DVD / Blu-ray drive on my machine (yeah, I'm very much the big man) which is all great and everything.
However, I've got quite a few region 1 DVDs that it won't play. I know I can switch my drive's region but this is limited to 5 times only.
Is there a way I can make the drive permanently multi-region or lift this limit, the same way you can with most DVD players?
Check to see whether or not the DVD drive is locked by a region code.
Drive Region Info is a simple freeware and portable tool that lets you know if your DVD drive is locked to any particular 'region'.
If your drive is locked after five changes you can use LtnRPC, a Region Free Utility for Lite-ON manufactured drives (your Sony DW-Q58A drive was manufactured by LiteOn) to reset the count or make the drive 'region free' altogether.
I just experienced the same issue with my BD-RE drive. I was ripping a DVD with DVDFab and an error occurred and the program quit. When I went back in to rip another DVD the program would not recognize the disk. I then looked at the drive in My Computer and realized that Windows 7 is not reading the DVDs at all. After a few reboots and removing the drivers and reinstalling them I still had not fixed the problem.
I then tried Microsoft's "FixIt" program which was a joke and did nothing. Next, at the advice of a Microsoft forum here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982116 I went into the registry and removed "UpperFilters" and "LowerFilters" from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}. After this, I restarted and Windows had a BSOD so I rebooted again and got in fine. However, my problem was still not fixed.
I then searched the web a little and found that other people with the same BD-RE drive (Lite-On ATAPI iHBS112 2) have had similar problems. I looked at my drive properties in Device Manager and under the Details tab I selected Hardware Ids and found that my firmware version was CL0B. I found http://www.firmwarehq.com/Lite-On/iHBS112%2B2/files.html and downloaded the firmware upgrade CL0K, installed it and restarted my system.
Now everything is back to normal and my drive works great. Hope this helps.
Best Answer
If you don't live in the 'land of the free' you can also install DVD43 which decrypts DVDs in the background and shows them to the player as region free.