Everyone:

Does anyone here have experience using the program "regionset" to change the region code on a DVD player?

Specifically, has anyone tried to make a drive region-free (region code 0)? And if so, with what result?

The problem: I have a boxed set of DVD's, 12 in all, from Region 2. I live in Region 1. A few versions of Fedora back (probably F21 or F22), I found I could play back those Region 2 disks without a problem. But now with F26, playback even on the "vlc" program gives me sound, but no picture--a black screen. Dragon refuses to play them at all. The makemkv program takes about ten minutes trying to do a workaround with the region codes not matching. Then it seems to work, but the output files all have sound (including all sound tracks if it has more than one), but no picture.

The way I see it, I can do one of two things, if I want to rip those disks:

1. Use regionset to change my DVD and BD drive temporarily to Region 2, rip the disks, then go back to Region 1.

2. Purchase and install a second optical-disk drive and use regionset to set that to Region 2 and leave it there. The second option would cost me about $50 US.

The larger problem is this: I don't necessarily want to limit myself to any one region. If I had to pick one "secondary region," it would be 2 because that includes Europe, the Middle East (including Israel), South Africa, and Japan. But if I want to play or rip a DVD from Australia, then I'm out of luck.

The really big hack would be to set my present optical drive to Region 0, and hope that would play any disk, from any region. But before I do something that could fry the drive forever, I would like someone to tell me whether he's ever done that before.

The only alternative is to shell out $600 US for a multi-region Blu-ray and DVD player. I would like to avoid that--mainly because I would like to avoid shelling out a lot of payola for a device having an esoteric feature I might use only once in a blue moon! Especially since I fully expect optical media to become obsolete in another ten years.

Any suggestions? Anecdotes? Horror stories?

Temlakos