Pioneer106S problem accessing region protected DVDs

[vidarso]

I have a problem with my new Pioneer DVD player (106S).

When I insert my region 2 DVD (Pulp Fiction) and browse in Explorer to the video files folder it tells me that it could not find disc in drive. Browsing to the sounds folder works just fine. Similar thing happens when I start my DVD player (ATI ver. 7 for all-in-wonder radeon8500dv region 2) - I get a message telling me that no disc was found.

I've tried different things though. Browsing web and forums to see if anyone have had a similar problem with solution without luck.

I've tried using DVDgenie to set windows98se region code. Used region killer to set region.

I've also updated firmware to ver1.22 with RPC-1, and the strange thing is when I do this I can run my DVD without problem until I reboot my computer again. If I flash it again it will work again. However, I am sure that this has nothing to do with my RPC-1 firmware because I had the same problem before I flashed it with the patched firmware.

I guess the DVD utility with its flash program does something with some settings that I've still not been able to do with any of the other "region free" utilities that I've downloaded and tried. But I'm sure there must be a sw solution to this.

I could flash my firmware each time I want to use a DVD disc, but if I do so I'm sure one day I loose power or something and kills my DVD-ROM forever - and I guess I can not flash the EEPROM unlimited times before its broken.

Any help will be appreciated highly. Thanks in advance.

My system:
Windows98SE (soon to be upgraded to XP or W2K)
ASUS A7V Athlon1100MHz 384MB SDRAM
Pioneer 106S DVD-ROM (IDE sec. master (if i dont remember wrong)
Mitsumi CD-ROM
Sony CRX120 CD-writer
2 ATA100 HD (primary and sec as master)
1 Seagate 3.2 GB IDE HD (running w98se (bad - i know...))
Hercules All-in-wonder radeon 8500dv
D-link firewire PCI
Soundblaster Live Value PCI
D-link network card PCI
Billion ISDN PCI adapter
Chieftech dragon miditower w/340W PS

[vidarso]

I found the solution to the problem myself

To end this thread I'll give the answer here.

I tried to set up my DVD-ROM on my ATA-100 controller and thats IT! Now my drive and software are working perfectly.

I didn't realise that ATA-66 also needed "improved" IDE cables (thought they were for 100 (and up)). I also found that I had problems reading other files than text-files such as jpg-files on a CD-R. That was what tracked me into hardware problems. Why my drive was working after flashing the firmware - I don't know... Maybe someone else have an answer to this? Indeed this mislead me to believe that it was a software problem...