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.