linux to an imac

2004-04-29 12:45 / discover the region of a mounted DVD  »

I've been bored, and trying to find out for someone how to discover the region of a given dvd. After loads of scouring, with my main pointer coming from the source for libmpdvdkit2, I've discovered that the region is set in byte 35 of a DVD's VIDEO_TS.IFO file. It's an 8-bit mask with set bits indicating forbidden regions.

The structural details of such a file, from berliOS, from sourceforge.

So I've written a li'l perl script that should tell you the region. Get it here.

You need to pass it the path to a VIDEO_TS.IFO file. For a DVD currently mounted on my mac:

perl show_region.pl /Volumes/DVDVolume/VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.IFO
VIDEO_TS_IFO has region mask: 11111101
VIEWABLE IN REGIONS: 2 (Japan, Europe, South Africa, and Middle East)

and for a region free bbc DVD that I own:

perl show_region.pl VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.IFO
VIDEO_TS_IFO has region mask: 00000000
VIEWABLE EVERYWHERE. WELCOME TO THE FREE WORLD!

If it doesn't work please tell me.