How To: Make your laptop play multiple region DVDs

As a guy with an American laptop in the heart of England, this has been a pressing question on my mind for the past month. Finding the answer was also one of the first big success stories for blog searching.

Googling phrases like “making laptops mult-region DVD” or “laptop DVD region unlock” (y’know, without the quotes) didn’t return anything too useful. Google blog-searching it, however, sent me through a useful journal or two and eventually to the site that I reference below.

It turns out that the answer I was looking for was far simpler than I thought…but I decided to post it as a how-to because, well, it should just be easier to find.

There are essentially two methods for unlocking your laptop.

The first is the more technical method, involving scary terms like “firmware” and digging through various parts of your system that, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be digging through.

There are a few good guides on how to manually unlock your drive, but the best one I found was at DVD Digest here.

They have it mapped out nicely in several pages (with a glossary!) and what sounds like pretty solid and user-friendly instructions.

The second method, and the one I recommend if you have any spare cash, is to use a bit of software. The two applications I found are shareware, which means that after the trial period I’m going to have to purchase one of them. If a freeware version of either of these apps exists, I don’t know about it.

They are DVD Region-Free and AnyDVD.

The AnyDVD shareware version is in fact a fully featured version (as far as I can tell), it just stops working after 21 days. The DVD Region-Free, however, will limit playback to 15 minutes at a time. At the moment I’m using AnyDVD, and it’s been working well.

I think there might be some software buffering involved, because every now and then it seemed like the movie chopped slightly—but I can’t be sure that wasn’t just my laptop in general. For all intents and purposes, it’s normal playback.

So if you’re cheap and brave (and who isn’t), give a shot at the manual unlock. If you do, let me know how it works when you’re done. Myself, I’m feeling lazy and protective at the moment, probably because if I break my laptop that it for my computer time over the next two months.