My friend asked me to help her buy the device mentioned in the subject line.
I’m good with PCs [literally an IT guy for 18 years at this point], but it turns out that once I’m trying to buy stuff for Macs I’m kind of out of my depth.
Specs for the Mac are:
“MBP Mid 2014, Retina 13”
Anyone have any suggestions?
Why does she need “region-free?”
The answer will help determine the drive.
She doesn’t want restrictions on the origins of the DVDs she plays.
Frequent international travel is a factor. Multiple overseas trips per year. Doesn’t want to buy a new DVD player at the airport when she gets there.
I’d try something like this tip:
I’d bet that any USB region-free player will work under OS X, but finding one might be a chore.
This could be hard. Years ago, circa 2000, I played around with this. IIRC, only certain, early generation DVD drives were capable of region free play and only with a hard to find hardware hack(firmware update).
Once you had that, you needed a way to disable the way the MacOS DVD software player which locked itself to the region of the first disk you inserted.
I also did this on Windows - but at some point (Vista or 7), the OS team dropped support for the early generation DVD players. At that point, I gave up.
I have no idea if the current MacOS will still support them.
Reported