Hey Gang,
I cam across this posting
http://forum.firmware-flash.com/viewtopic.php?t=16527
Which says you could watch dvds of all regions using VLC on the UJ 815, without flashing firmware and such ...
I am confused about the libraries part .. So, I may wait till I understand how that is supposed to work
Oh, here's a quick-n-dirty attempt at an explaination, assuming you don't really understand anything at all. For those that understand parts, just skip those parts ;)
If you're a developer, you would have noticed that along with a 'standard' OS X disk, you also got a disk of 'developer tools' (I don't have my disks handy, not sure of its exact name) in the packet of disks.
These tools let you compile [convert from a textual computer language (ie source) into binary (ie the 0's and 1's your computer understands, a program)] your own programs, or programs someone supplies to you. If there's a Unix program out there, someone may have ported it to OS X. (Although Unix is supposed to be 'universal' it isn't, generally there are a few little things that must be fixed from machine to machine to make the exact same program run.)
VLC is one such program. Its a general player. (Actually its the client part of an entire system, a server which serves or sends out video and a client which uses that provided by the server. In the case of VLC, the client can also 'read' local video content too, like a DVD).
Now enter the US Congress and laws about breaking software encryption for any reason being illegal. Add in a dose of the 1st ammendment that text (ie, the press and the 'written word') are protected. What you get is that the program source, ie the computer language that describes what the computer does to perform a task, is protected by the 1st ammendment, but the actual executable version of the program is illegal. What that means to you the end user is that VLC cannot 'break' the encryption on a DVD without running afoul of the law, but VLC can be written to use a program if its available. What you do is take the source, compile it and stick it into a library, a computer container for programs or parts of programs. Then you build VLC so it looks for the library and sees its there as it starts to run and uses it.
The VLC that you can download in binary form will not do raw reading, it will count on the DVD drive to decode the movie. You must build it yourself adding in the libraries mentioned in that link to allow it to read the raw data from the DVD and do the decoding within VLC. This is how you can get around the region encoding on a DVD.
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