This tutorial includes 4 parts:
Part 1, DVD Regions
Part 2, How to play DVD on Mac?
Part 3, How to Unlock DVD Regions on Mac?
Part 4, how to copy protected DVD Movie on Mac OS X
Part 1, DVD Regions
Region 1: North America; U.S. territories; Bermuda
Region 2: Europe; Western Asia; Kingdom of the Netherlands; Egypt, Japan, Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland; British overseas territories, French overseas territories; Greenland
Region 3: East and Southeast Asia
Region 4: Oceania; Central and South America; Caribbean; Mexico
Region 5: Africa, Central and South Asia, Belarus, India, Mongolia, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine
Region 6: Mainland China
Part 2, How to play DVD on Mac?
VLC is part of a remarkably sophisticated suite of VideoLan applications available for a wide range of operating systems, ranging from Linux to Windows and, of course, Mac OS X.
Download and install VLC and open it, then select File > Open Disc. Click on the Disc tab, click on DVD, select the device, and click OK
Or select File > Open File..., select your VIDEO_TS folder, and voila! You're watching your movie.
Part 3, How to Unlock DVD Regions on Mac?
Most commercial DVDs use encryption that keeps them locked to one or more “region codes,” meaning the discs you pick up in other continents usually won't play on an American DVD player. If you believe the movie studios, this encryption is a necessary tool in the ongoing war against piracy. Basically, it helps them release the same movie in different parts of the world—at different times and for different prices. However, because pirates rarely resell legitimate copies of movies (they are pirates, after all), this system's primary effect is to prevent movie collectors and frequent travelers from enjoying legally purchased films once they get home.
There are some multi-region DVD players out there. They are perfectly legal, but they tend to be pricey and rare. And if you are the jet-setting type who is likely to pick up foreign flicks in the first place, you probably want to watch them on the go using your laptop. That's why the most frustrating part of region codes is the way they affect laptop DVD players.
Although laptop DVD drives are technologically capable of playing any DVD, they typically force you to switch among region settings to play imported discs. Try switching this setting more than a fixed number of times (typically five over the entire life span of the computer), and the setting will be locked forever.
For example, if you switch from Region 1 (the United States and Canada) to Region 3 (parts of Asia) to watch a kung-fu flick you picked up on a trip to Hong Kong, you'll have to switch back to Region 1 before playing any movies you purchased at your local Best Buy. Watching that one Jet Li movie just burned up two of your five switches—and not even reinstalling your operating system will get you more. Fortunately, some clever programmers have created software solutions that circumvent disc regions entirely, turning your notebook into a portable multiregional DVD player.
There are plenty of programs for Macs that allow you to rip DVD movies on Mac. I recommend Aiseesoft DVD Ripper for Mac which allows you to rip DVD movies on Mac easily. This Mac DVD Ripper is fast in ripping DVD to all popular video and audio formats as it includes the features of DVD Ripper and DVD Audio Ripper. It can rip DVD video to video formats including MP4, AVI, MOV, M4V, 3GP, MPG, MPEG, FLV, etc. and it can convert DVD audio to MP3, M4A, AAC, AC3, etc. It's the best solution to rip a dvd to video or audio formats on Mac. This solution has its advantages (chief among them is that watching movies off your hard drive uses far less battery life than reading them from an optical disc.)
If you do not want to spend money, I recommend downloading VLC, an open-source media player that sometimes circumvents region encoding. The DVD drives on different computers (including various Macs) come from diverse manufacturers, a.nd VLC plays out-of-region discs on some, but not all of them. Unfortunately, there's no way to know if it will work on your system until you try. Fortunately, the program is free.
Part 4, how to copy protected DVD Movie on Mac OS X
Copy protected DVD action can turn into failure if you don't have appropriate software. Very often DVDs are protected against ripping and thus copying the contents of the disc to your hard disk doesn't work. Even if you do succeed in ripping the contents of the disc, to copy protected DVD also means to fit the files on your recordable DVD since the latter can only hold 4.4GB of data while the original DVD is more than 7GB in size.
Copy protected DVD software for those, who have no experience whatsoever with backing-up DVDs, is big deal. DVD Copy for Mac
