Region-locked DVD, don’t they drive you mad. I borrowed a copy of the movie Tokyo from a friend of mine recently and it was bought in Singapore by friend of hers. Because the DVD was intended for audiences in Singapore it only runs on drives with Region-code set to 3. I live in Australia where the region code is 4. Macs (or rather the DVD drives that come with macs) will usually let you change the DVD code 5 times before it gets  locked to the last selection. I have changed region code 3 times in the past and 2 changes left. There must be a patch or a clever hack by some genius somewhere. Good news: there is. A guys called xvi made a patch called Region X which lets users play DVDs of any region-code on the DVD Player software on Mac OS X. Bad News: Patching the DVD Player software isn’t enough, you need to patch the DVD drive’s firmware itself. That’s not completely a bad news though. The clever people around the world have patched firmware of lot of different DVD drives in production and they are available for download so that you can use. But what really is bad news is that the DVD drive in my mac (a macbook with a combo drive) is Mashita CW-8221 firmware: GA0J. And there doesn’t seem to be a patch available for it yet. Sigh! I guess I’ll have to watch it on the $40 Phillips DVD Player which is completely region-code free.