DVD Drive - Region Not Set

[flyinghaggis]

I'm not sure if this should be a hardware or a windows problem but we've just realised that the DVD drives in the PC's we've bought in the last year don’t have any default region set. Because of this none of them can play any DVD's with any region encoding on them (which is pretty much every DVD in existence!).

This setting itself is physically set on the DVD-ROM Drives firmware so there's no simple windows registry edit that will fix it. Obviously it's easy enough for us to change it on the PC's but we've got 100 PCs like this (maybe more) and we don’t want to have to go round each on individually.

We've looked into the options and MS have a piece of code that can allegedly set it. I've not compiled it to see if it will work yet but it's on the following page:-

 

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/DVDregion.mspx

 

I'm slightly worried by the fact this is an archived paper written in 2001 but it's all I can find about the subject. Users can't change the setting as it appears to requir administrator privileges to alter it. As far as I can see the only options are to create a Wininstall start-up script or to make an Auto-It script to change every drive to region 2. I'm a bit wary of doing either when it updates firmware on a device in the PC though.

Has anyone else encountered this problem with DVD regions not being set on new drives they've bought recently? Does anyone know of any easier ways to set this in remotely on multiple PC’s?

 

TIA

[Geoff]

If you install VLC media player on the PCs it will merrily ignore the region encoding set on the drive/disk and play it anyway.

[flyinghaggis]

If you install VLC media player on the PCs it will merrily ignore the region encoding set on the drive/disk and play it anyway.

 

That's a handy little trick! I'm a massive fan of the VLC but i think staff may struggle with the user interface as they're used to PowerDVD.

Did you notice if the PC DVD drives you've bought this year were set to region2 as the default or did you have to set the drive region yourself on every new PC?

[Geoff]

we image the PC's when we get them. So as long as it's correct on the image it doesn't matter what state they arrive in.

[flyinghaggis]

I assumed that because it was set in firmware that it wouldn't matter if you changed it in windows. Is there a setting you modified on the PC or in the registry to change the region?

What software are you using to image the PCs?

[Geoff]

AFAIK nothing was changed on the PCs. But I generally do not build the images myself. The only thing that would of been altered would be the setting in the device in hardware manager.

 

We use Ghost Enterprise for imaging.