How to play and rip any DVD regardless of its region code
Sorry, this post is Windows PC only
Just the other day, I got membership to a Video EZY video rental store near my apartment. Generally speaking, the deals for renting videos in Australia are pretty good. The selection of movies might not be as great as a video rental place back in the US, but for the price I’m paying I can easily convince myself to sacrifice and compromise on choices. For those who are curious, I’m paying something like $9 for 5 DVD rentals.
With that said, I’ve come across a stupid DVD snag that anybody who has ever owned an internationally-bought DVD has experienced: DVD region codes.
I’m not going to go in-depth on what DVD region codes are (you can read it for yourself at Wikipedia if you want a brief overview), but in short it’s just a copy-protection device embedded into DVD media (and DVD hardware, like your DVD player) to prevent it from being played in another country other than where it originated from.
Suffice it to say, DVD region codes are annoying and I’ve only just begun to experience how much of a pain-in-the-arse it is just for me — with a US computer with US parts — to play a DVD from Australia (the US is region 1 whereas Australia is region 4).
Now, most computers are “smart” enough to know which DVD region to change the hardware to in order to allow viewing of a DVD from another country, but the downside to that is that the code on your computer can only be a changed a maximum of 4 times (once again, this is suppsedly some fool-proof way to stop counterfeiting). Of course, there are firmware hacks to get around the 4-time maximum, but honestly, I couldn’t be bothered with them because they involve somewhat complicated procedures.
So how do I get DVD’s from other countries to play on my US-made computer? I use a nifty application called AnyDVD.
Once installed, AnyDVD will remove any region code from the DVD you are playing in real-time, allowing you to instantly view the DVD without having to wait for any long decoding and decrypting process. Essentially, it makes the DVD you are viewing a region 0 DVD (where “region 0″ actually means all of the region codes are activated).
Now that I’ve got the DVD playing, how do I copy and rip it to my hard-drive? Easy! With DVD Shrink (DVD Shrink also has some DVD decrypting tools, but they sort of suck compared to AnyDVD)!
But again, most people trying to rip a DVD will run into another problem: the DVD rip probably won’t fit onto a standard 4.7GB DVD-R. This is because most consumer DVD’s these days are dual-layer discs, meaning they fit more than the average DVD-R can hold. To get around this, DVD Shrink automatically “shrinks” and compresses the entire DVD to the best quality allowed for recording onto a 4.7GB DVD-R.
Additionally, DVD Shrink allows you to re-author the DVD, so if say, you know you’ll never use the subtitles in French, Spanish, and Chinese for any particular movie, you can remove them from the DVD altogether and use that extra saved space towards better DVD video compression.
Yep, AnyDVD and DVD Shrink are my “savior applications” when it comes to knocking down that terrible roadblock that is international DVD region codes. With these two applications installed, you won’t ever have to worry about what kind of DVD you’re renting or buying again.
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