Hack a Region Code for the Doctor

As a Doctor Who fan from way back, I finally got impatient waiting for someone here in the US to pick up the new Doctor Who series or start selling region 1 DVDs, so I’ve taken matters into my own hands. I had one of those ultra-cheap Cyberhome DVD players sitting in the closet unused and it turns out there’s a really simple hack for region coding. No soldering iron or programming skills needed. All you have to do is:

  • Power up the player with no disc in the tray.
  • On the remote control, press Menu, 1, 9 (Ignore “No” icons)
  • A region selection menu will appear, select Region 0

That’s it, you’ve now got a DVD player that will play what you want instead of what the movie industry wants.

The next step was to pick up some of the new Doctor Who series DVDs on eBay for cheap. So far, we’ve watched the first six episodes. It’s hard to top some of the classic episodes but some of the new ones aren’t bad. The first episode brought back the Autons and a later one featured a Dalek. It was definitely worth the trouble.

Doctor Who Region 1 DVDs

Woohoo! The BBC finally started releasing some Dr. Who region 1 DVDs. I don’t know why they bother with the region coding scheme in the first place. All it does is increase their production cost. There is only one Tom Baker episode out so far, The Robots of Death and there is also one Jon Pertwee episode, Spearhead from Space. I’m sure more episodes will be forthcoming. The one we got (the Tom Baker episode) came with a card you could mail back to vote on which episode would be released next.