DVD Region problem

[iamaelephant]

Hi, I bought the DVD box set of 24 Season 1 (having never seen the show and hearing people raving constantly) and the box had a sticker that said the DVD set was imported and may require a multi zone player. Naturally I said "well I'm playing it on my PC, she'll be right" and naturally I was wrong. I can't play the DVD, its says I'm in the wrong region. Is there any way of circumventing this problem, or have I screwed myself?

 

[Lord Evermore]

You haven't screwed yourself, yet.

If you bought your DVD drive in the US, it's Region 1 by default. PC drives can be changed to another region, but only a limited number of times. So you could change it to the proper region, and watch the set, as long as you don't need to watch DVDs from region 1 in the meantime, and then change it back to 1 when you're done (or just wait until the next time you need to watch a region 1 disc; data discs don't care). But now you've used up 2 of your allowed changes. The drive on my laptop is limited to 4, not sure if that's what they always are. The change is in the Properties for the drive in Device Manager.

I'm sure there are ways of circumventing it, but it's probably agains the forum rules to go into that sort of thing. Most likely there's a way to just rip the data from the disc, rather than watching it. Google can probably help you.