DVD43

Last Sunday (15 Apr 2007), I visited the new megastores at Tampines (Ikea, Courts, and Giant) for the first time. I learned 2 lessons from this outing:

1. Never visit 3 megastores at one go. It is tiring to walk around just one megastore, never mind three!
2. Never shop at Giant Tampines on Sunday, or at any peak period. The queues are horrendous!

I had not intended to buy anything at Giant. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Giant was selling the original DVD for "Superman Returns" for only $12. Now, that is even cheaper than the VCD version, which retails at $15! The DVD version even includes a second DVD containing a bonus documentary about the making of "Superman Returns", which was not available on the VCD.

There was a catch. This original $12 DVD is actually a Region 6 DVD, meant for the China market. Singapore is designated Region 3, as is most of South East Asia. However, the Region 3 DVD for "Superman Returns" retails for $30, which is significantly higher than $12 for the Region 6 DVD.

Theoretically, all DVD players sold in Singapore should only play Region 3 DVDs. However, most standalone DVD players have been tweaked at the factory to be "Region Free" - otherwise, consumers will not buy them. As such, playing the Region 6 DVD was not a problem on my standalone DVD player.

However, when it came to the DVD drive on my Dell notebook, this was not so simple. Region coding has not been disabled on the DVD drive on my notebook, which has been configured as Region 3. And all the DVD playing software provided by Dell (Dell MediaDirect as well as Microsoft Windows Media Player) "respected" the region code setting on the drive, and therefore refused to play the Region 6 DVD!

Although I could change the DVD Region setting on the DVD drive to play the disc, I am limited to only changing the region setting 5 times. This was not a permanent solution:

I did a Google search, and found the following freeware gem:

http://www.dvd43.com/

DVD43 installs on your Windows XP system and performs real-time decrypting of Region protected DVDs. When it is running, it displays a green smiley face on your system tray, and will auto-strip all Region protection from a protected DVD when the DVD is played.

And indeed, once installed, the Region 6 "Superman Returns" DVD played beautifully in both Microsoft Windows Media Player as well as Dell MediaDirect on my notebook.

Hope you find this tip useful.