Region Free iMac

Momus recently got a new iBook, and in his post about it he mentions the annoyance of not having a region free setting for his DVD drive. This is something I can relate to as I’ve also got a DVD collection that spans the globe, and so I’m limited to watching on my Hong Kong bought DVD player (which is starting to show signs of aging and extreme use). I like watching videos on my iMac more and more, finding it convenient to watch stuff in small windows while I’m doing other things, and I always found it a shame that I had to decide on one region only for my DVDs (I kept it at region 2). From the comments on his post, I got the tip of using VLC, a program I use daily, to watch DVDs, as it bypasses the region locks. Seems like those locks are put into place by Apple’s DVD Player, not the hardware. I changed the settings in my System Preferences so as not to start DVD Player when I load in a disk, and voila, I can watch anything on my Mac. Just tested it out with a region 3 disk from Hong Kong (WASABI), and it worked fine.