Oh Joy Oh Joy,
After several weeks of intense searching and crawling through forums I finally found a "firmware" upgrade that enables me to once again watch all the DVDs in my collection.

I spent a long time living in another part of the world and also do a lot of traveling. So when I am sitting in a hotel and the weather sucks I like to be able to buy/rent a DVD and watch the same on my laptop.

Unfortunately some fuckwits decided to invent region restrictions, what that means to me is that if I buy a 'standard' DVD player I can nolonger watch the DVDs I paid good money for if the region on the DVD does not match that of the Player.

Back in the ugly days when I was using windows I bought a tool called regionfree. The $20- cost is well worth the price.  When I switched to Linux regions where not an issue, smart people build linux, nough said.

For my MacBook things are tricky as the DVD player hardware itself is locked down. That is until today.

The following forum lists a firmware driver that set the region code to 1 = Region Free. Yahhhooo

P.S. Read the usual warnings. Applying a firmware update may KILL your drive.

The Firmware update worked for my 15" Intel Santa Rosa Mac Book Pro.
MATSHITA DVD-R   UJ-857E Firmware ZA0E

http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=43082

A HUGE THANKS TO THE GUY HOW BUILD THIS FIRMWARE UPDATE YOU ROCK!!!!