Sony DRU-500 Regional encoding

[littleghoulie]

Is there any way to bypass the regional encoding on the DRU, so that it doesn't keep counting down and lock in a region?
I'd really like to back-up some foreign discs, but don't want to get the player locked into a single region.

[dhc014]

Not yet

I don't know what method you are using, but can you use another DVD-ROM drive for ripping and only use the DRU-500A for burning as region free?

[arklab]

Yep, no RC1 firmware yet.

And the safest way to proceed for now is as dhc014 suggests.

But I understand that there are some programs that accomplish (more-or-less) the same thing.
One is DVD regon free. It doesn't fix the drive, but works to "fool" the OS into thinking the drive is RPC1.

You might want to check http://forum.rpc1.org/ for more info.