Looking to replace my aged NEC 3500 series optical drives with new sata interface ones (SATA to IDE converters seem to be almost as expensive as new drives!). My old NEC's have performed flawlessly for about 10 years. Hate factory firmwares that limit ripping speed, and don't want region locked drives either, and am open to non-factory firmwares to get what I need. Suggestions for either more reasonably priced converters or new drives please?
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Please recommend optical blu-ray/dvd drive w/region free firmware
- Thread starter nightfly
- Start date
bloodypulp
Gawd
- Joined
- May 17, 2010
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- 903
usb external optical drives are so cheap, i just keep one for each region.
How do you get an optical drive for a region that is different from your own?
They come from the factory without being set to any region. The first time you use it, it asks you to choose a region. Used to be you could change it once but that was it. Liggy and somebody's firmwares used to be available for most drives to make them region free, but I don't think they do that anymore, also, I was looking for a reference to find a really durable drive like my NEC 3500's were.
The idea of having a couple usb optical drives is a good one, I'm going to try it and hope that the ripping speed isn't locked too slow like they did to us back in the mid 2000's, back then the drive could rip at maybe 10x but the region protection told the drive to reduce it to 2x, making it take forever to rip a movie. I don't know if that's changed, and don't want to buy a drive that I can't unlock from that insanity.
Region protection on the foreign movies I watch is why I just rip to ISO ==> mount virtually. Some ripping tools ignore the region protection for the ripping process even though it kicks in during playback.
The amount of money spent on another optical drive can then be spent on HDD/CPU upgrade. I'm into obscure/older cinema though, which has region protection but not the ultra [h]ard DRM that new Hollywood blockbusters have.
Also, my DVD writers have allowed more than just 1 re-region (more like 5) for the past systems I've had between 2005 and now, but maybe I just got lucky? Still waiting for BD media to go down in price before getting a Bluray writer.
Example screencap from a minute ago:
The amount of money spent on another optical drive can then be spent on HDD/CPU upgrade. I'm into obscure/older cinema though, which has region protection but not the ultra [h]ard DRM that new Hollywood blockbusters have.
Also, my DVD writers have allowed more than just 1 re-region (more like 5) for the past systems I've had between 2005 and now, but maybe I just got lucky? Still waiting for BD media to go down in price before getting a Bluray writer.
Example screencap from a minute ago:
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For reference, here's the list of DVD region codes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd_region
Looks like 6 drives set to regions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 would cover everything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd_region
Looks like 6 drives set to regions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 would cover everything.
I'm pretty much covered by 1, 2, 3 and china but the ones I've gotten from china so far have all been region free (copies of old american movies before the studios actually made them for here, like the star wars dvd's, battle of the bulge and a few disney movies that weren't made here due to copyright problems.
I used to love Pioneer drives, and found some Pioneer slim drives in usb cases so I'm going with those.
I used to love Pioneer drives, and found some Pioneer slim drives in usb cases so I'm going with those.