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Unable to get HP BD MLT UJ 262 to play non-region 4 DVD/BD

fred.albert

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Apologies if this is a repeated post. My last post didn't seem to get added to the forum. I have a new Win10 laptop with an HP dvd/bd drive. I have set the region with Anydvd off to my region (region 4) but I can't get the drive to work for other regions. I am using PowerDVD 15 as my player. Everything works ok in a USB Samsung external drive. Logfile from French DVD attached "The Hedgehog."
What else can I do?
Thanks
Fred
 

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The problem is, that that's a matshita drive. The thing with those is that they don't have the region stored at fw level like most drives, but at the HARDWARE level. You can't change that, and neither can Anydvd bypass it. You have 2 options, 1 of which you're already using.

1) use an external drive
2) swap out that internal slimdrive for a non-matSHITa one.

But the drive region is only for DVD's, it should have no issue with blu-ray discs, BD region's are stored on the disc itself, not the drive.

There's nothing anydvd can do, hell its in the drive brand name matSHITa ;). It's not an anydvd nor disc problem, its a drive specific issue.
 
Well that explains it

I didn't realise it was a Mashita drive.
Thanks
Fred
 
All it took to find that out was a simple search on "BD MLT UJ 262", google did the rest :p

Also if you want your player to play non-local bluray discs, you will need to remove the disc region. To do so, it is vital you specify the blu-ray DISC region. NOT your own.

eg: you're in region 4 DVD (eg australia), the matching blu-ray region is B but you want to remove the region from a disc in the USA (region A). In such a case you must tell anydvd region A (disc region), NOT region B. specifying an incorrect region will result in a non-playable disc.

Anyway, glad i could be of assistance.
 
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The problem is, that that's a matshita drive. The thing with those is that they don't have the region stored at fw level like most drives, but at the HARDWARE level. You can't change that, and neither can Anydvd bypass it. You have 2 options, 1 of which you're already using.

1) use an external drive
2) swap out that internal slimdrive for a non-matSHITa one.

But the drive region is only for DVD's, it should have no issue with blu-ray discs, BD region's are stored on the disc itself, not the drive.

There's nothing anydvd can do, hell its in the drive brand name matSHITa ;). It's not an anydvd nor disc problem, its a drive specific issue.

From your message it's clear you don't like Matsushita drives and hence your comment. I'm curious though because I have the UJ265 in my laptop and haven't had any region issues. I do recall having to set the region twice (once for the drive and once for Windows 7), but after that, the drive seems to work fine (in fact, I'm pretty impressed with it's performance relative to laptop drives). If the region is hardware based (and can't be changed), how can their drives work in different regions? Perhaps in this case, it's not the drive that causing fred.albert's problems??
 
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me not liking them has nothing to do with it. In fact my laptop doesn't have one. It's just a well established "reputation" and behavior for matshita drives. I can't help it, it's in the name ;) The fact that you're not having issues, you need to ask yourself. Are you trying to remove the dvd region from discs that are from a different region zone than your own? If not, then your post is irrelevant about not having issues. You're not doing what OP is doing.

Setting the region twice is not possible. You set it once for the drive and be done with it, there is no "region for windows 7", you likely set the blu-ray region on the player. Has nothing to do with the OS.

And how can they function in different regions? Very simple, hardcoded region in the drive matching the region.

It is the drive that's causing the behavior, if you read hs previous posts he sais it himself too. "works fine in external drive", that's because the external one is not a matshita one.
 
me not liking them has nothing to do with it. In fact my laptop doesn't have one. It's just a well established "reputation" and behavior for matshita drives. I can't help it, it's in the name ;)

Got the humor in that and I didn't say you're not liking them had anything to do with anything other than your comment.

The fact that you're not having issues, you need to ask yourself. Are you trying to remove the dvd region from discs that are from a different region zone than your own? If not, then your post is irrelevant about not having issues. You're not doing what OP is doing.

You are quite correct, I'm probably not doing what the OP is doing. Just made the statement that I haven't had any region issues.


Setting the region twice is not possible. You set it once for the drive and be done with it, there is no "region for windows 7", you likely set the blu-ray region on the player. Has nothing to do with the OS.

Again, you're very much correct (nothing to do with the OS), but more to the point of my question, if the region is burned into the "hardware" of the drive, how could I be changing it? Right now, I can't remember why it took two operations, but one of those set the drive region and you state that was not possible - just wondering?

And how can they function in different regions? Very simple, hardcoded region in the drive matching the region.

Do you mean that Matsushita makes different drives for every region? That could be possible, but doesn't sound practical for them as a manufacturing practice.

It is the drive that's causing the behavior, if you read hs previous posts he sais it himself too. "works fine in external drive", that's because the external one is not a matshita one.

Not at all questioning that conclusion.
 
you're changing the firmware of the drive, that's all you were doing. However that is overridden by the drive's hardware region. which is why anydvd works fine as long as you don't try to use different region discs, if you do that's when the problems start. I didn't say it wasn't possible, i said it wasn't possible that you set the drive's region twice. Once you click "ok" the windows region setting frame closes.

offcourse they make drives for every region, every drive manufacturer does. The only difference is that matshita does drive region setting on a hardware basis too while other manufacturers stick to firmware based region only. As far as the not practical goes, don't know about that could be something as simple as a different chip on the drives board to a entire different motherboard in it. Nothing hard to do with a different production line.
 
offcourse they make drives for every region, every drive manufacturer does. The only difference is that matshita does drive region setting on a hardware basis too while other manufacturers stick to firmware based region only. As far as the not practical goes, don't know about that could be something as simple as a different chip on the drives board to a entire different motherboard in it. Nothing hard to do with a different production line.

No, this is not correct.
Of course all drives are the same in every region. The difference between Matsushita (aka Panasonic) and the rest is, that Panasonic drives refuse to read encrypted sectors on region code mismatch (where no region set means a mismatch with every region).
Other drives will read encrypted sectors, but won't decrypt the content. In this case AnyDVD can use brute force.
As Panasonic drives don't read, ... well, the result is obvious.

Why Panasonic does this, I don't know. AFAIK no standard requires this. I would have expected such behavior from Sony drives, but no.
 
So it's still a hardware thing, but not that the region is stored at the hardware level. I wonder why everyone always said that then (I was just going from what had been said in the past.), lack of technical knowledge I guess.

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So it's still a hardware thing, but not that the region is stored at the hardware level. I wonder why everyone always said that then (I was just going from what had been said in the past.), lack of technical knowledge I guess.

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I'm not sure what you mean by "hardware thing". It is how the software in the drive (firmware) is designed. And there aren't different Panasonic (hardware) drives for different regions.
 
.................Of course all drives are the same in every region. The difference between Matsushita (aka Panasonic) and the rest is, that Panasonic drives refuse to read encrypted sectors on region code mismatch (where no region set means a mismatch with every region).
Other drives will read encrypted sectors, but won't decrypt the content. In this case AnyDVD can use brute force.
As Panasonic drives don't read, ... well, the result is obvious...............

Thanks for that James. That does make sense. When you say "no region set", are you referring to the drive when I originally set its region after installing it?

My understanding from what you said is that if I try to read a region coded disc from a region other than what the drive is set for (using a Panasonic drive), it won't read the encrypted sectors. Is that right? If that's the case, I would need to go in and change the drive region to match that of the disc, correct??

Also, if I had set the drive for no region, it wouldn't read sectors on any discs (or is that actually an option with the drive)??

I do understand now, that if the drive isn't handing AnyDVD HD something to decrypt - nada (and that's the situation for Panasonic drives in cases where the drive region doesn't match the disc region).
 
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Thanks for that James. That does make sense. When you say "no region set", are you referring to the drive when I originally set its region after installing it?

Yes, that's what he's talking about. Initially drives come with region 0 (which isn't a technically a valid region). Region 0 is often referred to as region free but it's not. Region 0 is different from an actually region free drive where the region setting would actually be "Region: Free". Region 0 simply means, a drive region hasn't been set yet

My understanding from what you said is that if I try to read a region coded disc from a region other than what the drive is set for (using a Panasonic drive), it won't read the encrypted sectors. Is that right? If that's the case, I would need to go in and change the drive region to match that of the disc, correct??
That's what i understood from it too, but you have to remember a drive only has 5 changes alotted for region setting. So you can only go back and forth a limited time, after the 5th setting the region is permanent and can no longer be changed at all

Also, if I had set the drive for no region, it wouldn't read sectors on any discs (or is that actually an option with the drive)??

Technically drives can work just fine with the region not set, however when it comes to decrypting and ripping that's a different matter. An unset region can cause issues with decrypting CSS protected discs with anydvd. Anydvd can in general then try a bruteforce attack method to get the decryption key but that doesn't always work. That's on top of the issue if you try to decrypt a disc with a different region than the drive's.

I do understand now, that if the drive isn't handing AnyDVD HD something to decrypt - nada (and that's the situation for Panasonic drives in cases where the drive region doesn't match the disc region).

Correct, with disc inserted different than the drive's region the drive refuses to read the encrypted sectors. In turn no data flows to anydvd, and anydvd can't do anything to decrypt/remove the region. That's how i think it works.
 
Hello,

My current UJ-265 suffers from this. I'm now shopping for a Blu-Ray drive for desktop PC. Do ASUS and LG drivers suffer from this same issue?

Thank you.
 
None of my drives do, as their full sized 5.25" bay desktop drives.
 
So technically we would have to alter the firmware by either allowing it make infinite number of region changes (not a neat fix considering it would require a lot of playing around to perform a good rip unless Anydvd is written to able to automate it somehow which would totally depend on a firmware hack enabling the above which I would imagine would be fairly hard) or completely rewrite the firmware removing all limitations and dependencies on regions which is extremely complex.

I remember in the olden days hacked firmware was a big thing and people were constantly doing such things but not so much now in fact I don't see anyone ever doing it anymore.
The sad part is that there is barely any options when it comes to internal laptop drives.
I have a Matshita BD-MLT UJ272 drive so I understand everyone's pain.
 
There was a site specialising in such firmware (RPC1) that did just that. This isn't an anydvd issue. The problem is that with matSHITa drives, the region is hardcoded at the firmware level, (even if you specify another one). You can always switch out that drive, there's plenty slim drives you just gotta make sure its of a matching thinkness (7/9mm maybe even 11)
 
There was a site specialising in such firmware (RPC1) that did just that. This isn't an anydvd issue. The problem is that with matSHITa drives, the region is hardcoded at the firmware level, (even if you specify another one). You can always switch out that drive, there's plenty slim drives you just gotta make sure its of a matching thinkness (7/9mm maybe even 11)

Yeah I remember the site :)
Fragments of it still exist but its no longer updated and nobody bothers getting into the technical aspects of drive firmware.
Yeah AnyDVD does a phenomenal job as its but this is out of its scope.
I may have to put in some research and find a drive to match the specs of this one (which I had trouble finding before) but boy would I have loved to have the skills, knowledge and ability to stick it to Panasonic and award everyone the freedom they deserve to use the drive as they see fit.
I totally understand why you emphasize the S H I T in the name.
 
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