Best Answer

The previous answer is incorrect.

The drives are not region free. the drives enforce the regions through their firmware. the Computer or the OS helps you change it, but it cannot "undo" a change. 5 changes lock a drive.

- Some third party programs like VLC will ignore a region code mismatch, but it is only useful if the disc data is not encrypted. Most discs are. so VLC will fail to read a disc that is encrypted, because the drive will not play along in decrypting the data for VLC.

- The Optical drive's firmware only allows for the region on it to be changed 5 times. after that it is locked by the drive itself, and the region can't be changed again.

- There are ways to change the firmware of optical drives to ignore the regions, but for most modern drives that Apple uses, there is no "region Free" hacks that currently work, and probably not anytime soon.

The short answer is you can change the region 5 times, and that's that. After that, it is locked to that region.

• Answered by JW from La Mesa
• 20-Oct-2009
• Flag as inappropriate