Hi,

Long time reader, newly registered .

To cut a long story short, a friend bought a new liteon dvd drive, and when flashing the firmware to make it regionfree, it flashed his liteon cdrw with the same firmware. Not a good start.

Anyhow, I revived his cdrw for him, and flashed his dvd drive on my machine. Now to make his dvd drive region free required the liteom utility to 'reset' the number of times you could change region of the drive, all seems well.....

Until I find that my Pioneer 106s (slot) and NEC2500a appear be be region locked. They both have regionfree firmware and never had an issue before sorting out this problem for a friend. In DVDInfo Pro, both drives come up as regionfree and say number of hardware changes and vendor changes as N/A. Its only when I run WinDVD or any other DVD playback software does it say I have no global regin setting changes left, and can no longer play a region 1 dvd.

Anybody any idea what has happened here? Is there some setting in windows that have changed? Or some registry hack required? The odd thing is, that the total number of 'lives' I had to change the region seemed a combined total between my two dvd drives, and not one for each, so im thinking this is a software related issue, opposed to hardware, but Im not sure.

If ayone can shed some light Id be very grateful.

Thanks

Methinks you need to reinstall elby's dvdregion killer, or whatever it was you were using to simulate the correct region.

I just have done actually, on a recommendation, and it has made no difference. I didnt have any form of region killer installed before. WinDVD just says it cannot permit playback of this region of dvd and I have 0 changes left, regardless of Region killer being on or not.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Also WinDVD has a default dvdrom selected, are you selecting the right one?

Keep in mind that if DVD drives are RPC1, windows will try to keep a count for region locking, so a region free utility is definately required,

Dvdregion killer also has an option to set a default region. You should do this, it will automatically change as required.

Have you tried shuffling the drives around the IDE chains, ie swap primary/secondary channel or master/slave?

I have just installed region killer, and WinDVD is still asking me to change regions when I switch to and from region 1, 2 dvds.I have kind of got a work around with using Power DVD for Region 1 and WinDVD for region 2. Not sure why Region killer isnt working. Im not soo sure swapping ide channels will make a significant difference? I have the NEC as master on secondary channel, and the 106 as slave.

Just allow region changes.

DVD Region killer will do the rest.