A DVD issue

So one day I put a DVD in my DVD drive and it refused to play it. Upon checking in device manager I discovered that it was set to a different region. So I brought it to the store where I bought it, and told them that it changed its region settings. The guy said he'll "check it out", and then told me the following:

When you insert a different region into the drive, it automatically changes its region setting to play it. It can only change it a limited amount of times, and mine got stuck in a wrong region. Now, I was always under the impression that when you insert the wrong region into the drive it's supposed to refuses to play it, not change its settings to accomodate the media. Also, even if this function exists, shouldn't it be disabled when you instal the drive to avoid such problems?

It's even worse that I don't even have any cd's hat are of different regions, but that's another thing. Is the guy from the stre right? Was he supposed to disable such function if it exists (the only way I could find to change the settings is by putting a different region cd and MANUALLTY command it to change the setting from it's proporties in device manager)?

 

Yes he is right in a way, with most drives (and the OS) having a specific counter for the number of times the regios can be changed - usually 5. Though I have never seen it done automatically. In my case usually when playing a dvd with powerdvd it pops up a region change window when a new region disc is inserted and you have a choice to click ok or cancel. Iy will also show you how many changes you have left

This can be bypassed in two ways - update the firmware to a region free if it is available for your drive (search your drive name + rpc1 + firmware download in google or look at www.rpc1.org). Second simpler way is to use a software bypass program such as AnyDVD - http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvd.html