Playing DVDs from other regions

I moved to different continents a few times (Europe -> North America -> Asia -> Europe) and ended up with a stack of DVDs I can't play now.

I looked around for a firmware update for my iMac, but it doesn't look like it exists:

http://www.rpc1.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=49450

Since I got the DVDs legitimately, I feel like I have the right to play them. So my question is, I mainly have a whole bunch of DVDs from North America. Is my only safe option to buy a secondary external DVD player for this region, or is it possible to find a region-free DVD player altogether (I'm in Germany right now). I had trouble finding it.

What I believe you can do is to use VLC instead of the built-in DVD Player app to play your DVDs.

I've had a similar problem, because DVD Player always wanted me to pick one region. I then discovered that if I play the DVD in VLC it doesn't ask me about any region settings and just plays the movie.

VLC may not be an adequate solution -- on some Macs (my 2009 Mac Pro, for one), if a drive doesn't have a matching region code, it won't serve data to VLC or any other software. If you have such a drive, your only solution will be to get another DVD drive that is not so restrictive. The external superdrive that I use with my Macbook Air, for example, allows the VLC trick to work, and allows me to rip non-U.S. discs so I can convert them to universal format and play them on my DVD player.

I don't know of any way to tell the friendly drives from the unfriendly ones except by trial and error.

Remember to go to System Preferences, "CDs & DVDs" and set "When you insert a video DVD" to "Ignore" before you try any of these tricks. If it's set to "Open DVD Player," that program will do a region check every time, which you do not want.