Did anyone took the risk to update DVD firmware

[edelrc]

My T42p Thinkpad has a Matshita DVD-RAM UJ-812 K103 and, of course, Region Protection!

Recently, someone has release a firmware to take that Region protection out... did any of you took the risk of applying it???

You can check your drive with the tiny (7kb) application available at
http://www.remoteselector.com/driveinfo.htm (This is a totally safe to do! )

And fashes are, for instance, available at
http://forum.rpc1.org/dl_firmware.php?download_id=1780
( THIS IS NOT SAFE TO DO, PLEASE, DO NOT FLASH THE DRIVE UNLESS YOU KNOW THE RISK!!! )
(Note that the K104 comes from an IBM server...!?!)

[nacy333]

I've actually have not had the need to do this. I've been able to watch Region 3, 0 and 1 dvd's with no problem when viewing them with Windows Media Player. I'm afraid that if I watch them with the pre-installed dvd software (I believe its WinDVD) that it would somehow force my player into playing only region 1 and 0 DVD's.

I've recently did a reformat and decided not to install the WinDVD application, opting to go with the decoder that came with my purchase of Nero 6.0 Ultra. Still no problems switching back and forth, though I am still only watching dvd's with Windows Media Player.

[Merlyn_3D]

I don't have a floppy drive to do the update with.

[lfeagan]

You can buy a new IBM USB floppy drive on ebay for like 20 bucks. There are tons of them on there all the time.

Just search for IBM USB Floppy, 94 came up.

[edelrc]

Hum, I did not know you will need an floppy drive. I guess, you could use instead a virtual drive but now I think that the risk of flashing the drive is not worth the whole proccess. I´ll try to solve the problem with software instead.

Thanks to all.

[KillaByte]

I did the K103 to K104 upgrade. However, this doesn't remove region protection since this is the official update from IBM (as you already noted).

Some people here managed to get the update done without a floppy drive. If you search around a bit you should be able to find it.

At the moment there is no way to circumvent region protection with that drive since it doesn't allow software to even read the encrypted sectors from the disc if the region codes don't match.

[Dr Dan]

DVD Region Free?

http://www.dvdidle.com/dvd-region-free.htm

Haven't tried it yet but had good results with it in the past.

Dan.

[KillaByte]

Nope - none of these software-region-free tools will work on this drive. This is because they rely on being able to get the encrypted sectors from the drive no matter if the regions match or not. This drive takes the region protection a wee bit too seriously and doesn't even allow that.

Because of that we'll have to wait until someone comes up with an appropriate firmware-patch.

[Leon]

so, the firmware patch mentioned in the first post does not work?

[edelrc]

Leon, I also think they won´t... They come from official servers, so i doubt it too.

I heard the same thing as KillaByte before in this forum and that is why software as Anydvd v4.x does not work with this drive. However, I will see if "DVD Region+CSS Free v5.60" can free my drive.

I can´t understand when a company (Matshita) does the extra mile (did they hire extra programmers?) to lock our drives... if Hollywood wants it that way, Hollywood should have pay for MY drive!)

(By the way, I bought a DVD player for my TV, and in some forums I found that many players have a hiden code to unlock the region restrictions... Now mine works great with my Americann and European movies!!! But I am sure that Sony players probably won´t have any of these code to do that... )