Hi all,

One of our VAIO users is a fairly frequent flyer and picks up DVDs in the UK and US. He’s now reached his region-change limit and is stuck on US.

Has anyone managed to undo the region locking for this or similar machines?

Cheers.

Are we talking about the windows counter or the drive counter?

If we are dealing with the drive counter:
http://forum.rpc1.org/portal.php

They hack DVD drive firmware to make it RPC1 (region free).
You can check if theres a firmware for you drive.

In case theres not… they provide information to bypass the region check using software apps. Its too much to explain here. See for yourself!

Good advice silyb0y. I use their site as well and it works well! I also have their link on my website.

What Vaio is it and what drive is in? Many Vaio use Matshita UJ-8xx, if it is one of those, do not bother. Panasonic went overboard with the firmware protection and it seems like noone will ever be able to make one of those drives RPC-1. Your user is unfortunately stuck on the region code the drive is in now. Only solution is an external DVD reader.

You can find some information here: http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=34750&postdays=0&postorder=asc&&start;=0

And even AnyDVD won’t work, here’s a reponse from someone with Slysoft:

AnyDVD works with Matsushita (Panasonic) drives, as long as:

1.) The drive is set to a specific region code. If your drive isn’t, set your preferred region.
2.) CSS protected discs match this region

AnyDVD does not allow you with Matsushita (Panasonic) drives to watch or copy a CSS protected disc, which has a different region then the drive, unless you have a patched firmware. (AnyDVD allows this with every other drive)

The reason is rather simple:

MMC standard requires, that a drive should not reveal a title key on a region mismatched CSS protected disc. (It should return “Illegal request - region code does not match”). Some drives are even less restrictive and even give you the title key on region mismatch.
But AnyDVD can usually reveal the title key with a brute force attack, as long as the drive allows you to read the scrambled sectors.
Matsushita (Panasonic) drives do not! You CANNOT read the scrambled data, if the region code doesn’t match.
No other drive behaves this way, only Matsushita (Panasonic) drives do, as the standard does not require a drive to not reveal the protected data on region mismatch, but Matsushita (Panasonic) drives are more restrictive as they need to be.

There is nothing AnyDVD, DVDDecrypter, or any other software can do about this. Sorry.

Solution: Set the drive to a region, and only use matching discs. AnyDVD will remove CSS/Macrovision/Adverts/User prohibitions/forced subtitles/FBI warnings/... no problem.

It cannot bypass region codes with Matsushita (Panasonic) drives.

I hope this answers your question.

Its not a question of being able or not. Its a question of wanting to do it or not.

Couple of years ago there were alot of people working for the RPC1 forum. You got a new DVD drive… month later you had it RPC1 with a hacked firmware from the forum.

Problem is… how can you expect people to sit in front of their computer all day and do reverse engineering for nothing? No money, no thank you… just nothing. `

You gotta get the firmware from somewhere. You gotta hack and test it before you publish it. Where do you get the hardware for testing from?
Besides that… Matshita firmware is pretty well encrypted.

So most of these skilled programmers gave it up. I remember a discussion on the RPC1 forum where one of the guys who was specialiced on the Matshita UJ and UJDA drives (he wrote the UJDA Autopatcher) anounced that he would give it up. That was the time when I gave up hoping for to get a RPC1 firmware for my drive.

I was hoping that meanwhile someone has gotten something to work… what is actually very unlikely.