Change DVD Drive Region

Like regular DVD players it seems that disk drives in computers also are configured to a specific region for locking purposes.

For example, my copy of a movie refused to play in VLC and gave no warning or error pop ups, just that it couldn’t read the disk. This was despite the fact that the OS could read the contents of the disk.

This is a DRM technique to control international distribution of media. Each DVD drive is configured to a certain region code and will only work with disks compatible with that region.

Annoyingly, it appears drives can only change disk regions a number of times before not being able to change again.

Changing the region code

Luckily, for Linux there is a neat tool called regionset. The website can be found here: http://linvdr.org/projects/regionset/ The website will also list the regions as you must refer to the code that you want to change to.

On Arch Linux it can be installed via the AUR:

paru -S regionset

Then use regionset with the drive that you wish to change:

regionset /dev/sr0

Then follow the prompts to change the region.