Blueray I have a Acer Aspire 8920G "Gemstone" Laptop. with a blueray drive 'optiarc bd rom bc-5500a ata device ' the problem is when i try to play a blueray movie i get a message that " it is not a region "B" machine" how do i change it to a region"B" machine ? thanks pandrew

You can always invest in the program called AnyDVD. It can be found at
http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvdhd.html

This should solve your region issues with the BlueRay disks. Run this program, then insert your movie into the dvd player, and watch the movie play. Take care and enjoy!

Pandrew,
The reason you are receiving a "region B error" is because the Blue-ray you are attempting to play is not designated to work with the current drive you have. The regions (A-B-C) were designed so that certain DVD's would only work in certain countries. For instance - Region B DVD's were made to only work in Africa, Europe, Oceania, Middle East, Kingdom of the Netherlands, GB, French territories, and Greenland. Manufacturers did this so that they are able to control what content is released per country.

If you are using Windows XP or Windows Vista, you can use power DVD to correct this problem by editing the registry keys.

After installing PowerDVD, the program will initiate the default value of Region A and 5 remaining changes, and there is not settings in the registry. When region code changed, PowerDVD stores rgion information at this registry key in Windows XP:
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{631400EE-60DF-4014-8A01-67106E57BDA8}]
@=dword:00000002
The value can be 1 for Region A, 2 for Region B, 4 for Region C.
There is another registry key that stores the number of remaining changes to region code allowed:
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{9CB23675-4229-4630-AFF6-3668BA6AF33E}]
@=dword:00000004
Every time you change region in PowerDVD, this number is decremented by 1.
Thus, to hack PowerDVD region code control in Windows Vista, you can either change the region code directly from the registry, or the value of remaining times left allowed to change region code can be set sky high (such as 65,536 times) so that you can change the region code without limitation.
You can use a registry export file to automate the process. Download the BDregion.zip archive file with BDregionA.reg (to set to region A), BDregionB.reg (to set to region B), BDregionC.reg (to set to Region C) and BDregionNoLimit.reg (to set number of times left for region change to FFFF or 64k times).