PS3 DVD region free mystery on CECH-20xx and CECH-21xx

W

wolf_re

Forum Noob
Sooo I have this mystery to solve :D

I bought my PS3 quite a while ago and the model that I got is a CECH-2004a (the 1st slim model 120 gb). Around the time the exploit came out I jailbroke it and everything was peachy. Except it was not DVD region free (see details further down). The bluray region could be switched as intended but the DVD region was locked to (DVD region) 2. That was not a big deal for me as I do have a stand alone region free DVD and BD player, and I bought the PS3 for gaming.

A while back used PS3s got really cheap and two of my friends also bought one (same model as mine). We also jailbroke both consoles. In both cases they are locked to DVD region 2, and bluray region can be freely changed (same as mine).

So I briefly spent some time googling around (also searching this forum) and came up mostly empty. No one seems to actually know what is going on, and discussion mostly ends without any progress:
https://www.psx-place.com/threads/dvd-region-free-playback-help.1664/page-2
(Maybe my google-fu just isn't good enough ...)

Meanwhile the PS3s got even cheaper and two more consoles landed at my place for jailbreaking from another friend. This time both were CECH-2104b (the 2nd slim model 250 gb). After jailbreaking we noticed that those were not only bluray region switchable but in fact dvd region free!

Wait what?!
So I confirmed this with DVDs from various regions, stuff I had lying around was from DVD region 1, 2, 3. All of them worked (see further down for details on the discs I tried)! For the record I did not try an RCE DVD.

The first thing I did was look around on the https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3 for the differences between the two models (awesome knowledge base BTW). Here are the highlights I came up with (based mostly on https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Bluray_Drive#Bluray_Drive_Revisions ):

Next I made sure both my 20xx and my friends 21xx console have the same SW on them.
Here's what's installed right now:
  • Rebug 4.86.1 - Light (md5 a2c79919cafdbb50ccb5ee9589245380)
  • multiMAN 04.85.01 BASE 20191010 (md5 06bcd1c3f4469a4e618c8937811c5753)
  • webMAN MOD 1.47.25.10 (md5 57067ef79837c78f2aaa02fab381a472)

I installed the above on the 21xx right after JB, and all settings (cobra / QA flag / etc) are untouched defaults.
For my 20xx I did first update Rebug (had 4.84.2 on it), then uninstall webMAN and multiMAN, then reinstall rebug tool box, then install multiMAN then install webMAN. I briefly went over the CFW settings on the 20xx and they should be the same as on the 21xx (I did not left/right compare them). Concerning the language selection that you get on a freshly reset console (mentioned in the above linked thread):
  • I did that with mine after I got it and chose English / UK. Not sure how I got there, but probably a combo of format util and something in recovery.
  • I did that with the 21xx, the console did ask me for this on first boot and I chose the same.
However I do not think that makes any difference, as DVD region 2 is valid all across Europe and Japan. So mapping from a language to a DVD region does not really work. Concerning the DVD region selection on either webMAN or multiMAN, none of them do anything for the 20xx console(s). I did not try messing with that on the 21xx, its set to default.

So how does trying to play a DVD look like?
On the 21xx the DVD region is set to "Default" (both in multiMAN and webMAN). I just throw in any of the test DVDs and it plays from the XMB without any additional steps. That means the 21xx is truly DVD region free (as compared to the BD region which can be switched, but is not "free" as such). Doing the same on the 20xx for a non-supported region (details further down) will boot up the DVD player application same as 21xx. However in the DVD player app, after a brief flash of the "I'm doing stuff" indicator (clock/circle upper right corner), it will display this message: "This disc cannot be played. The region code is not correct." Which only offers a "back" option that will stop the player app and get you back to the XMB again. I vaguely remember that on an OFW XMB would already refuse to start the player app, however I may be mistaken (can anyone confirm this?).

Here's the selection of DVDs I tried:
  • R1 with CSS ("The Negotiator" Warner 085391675020)
  • R2 with CSS ("Startup" UFA 743218968792)
  • R3 with CSS ("Mad monkey Kungfu" IVL 4891670105142)
  • R3 no CSS ("Wheels On Meals" Fortune Star 4895074412226)

I verified each discs region using IfoEdit, looking at the actual settings on the DVD to be sure. Each disc was only enabled for a single region, however not each disc had CSS. I verified CSS by not using a proper DVD player, by using cat to pipe a VOB into ffplay. This does prevent any authentication from happening between the player (ffplay) and the drive. Doing so on CSS discs will just fail to play any video.

All 4 discs worked in the 21xx machine right from XMB, as described above. Popping in those discs into the 20xx revealed some interesting findings (all tested with the above mentioned software versions):
  • R2 with CSS worked, as expected that is the region this PS3 is coded for
  • R1 and R3 with CSS failed with the above "region not correct" message
  • R3 without CSS worked, this was unexpected :playful:

So my conclusion from all this is:
The whole "software side" of things (XMB/OS and player app) are in fact region free. This is based on the fact that both 20xx and 21xx consoles run the same software now and both boot up the player app. AFAIK CSS and regions are tied together not only in the SW player but also the HW/FW of the drive. The drive is only supposed to volunteer its part of the CSS decryption process / key when the disc region matches its intended region. This is what's called a "RPC Phase II drive" according to Wikipedia. So either the drives/BMD/FW in the two 21xx were "RPC Phase I" / RPC1. Or what ever is at work in Rebug/multiMAN/webMAN doing magic with the drives/BMD/FW is not working with the combination in 20xx models. I think it is the latter as I don't think RPC1 drives were "just sold" for personal use and not in a very popular game console ... but that is conjecture.

So my understanding is that COBRA is doing all this stuff with the drive, but I may be wrong here ...
Can anyone with detailed knowledge comment on this?
Can I supply any logs to maybe further analyze this?
Feel free to ask for any details I missed (probably a lot).
It would be awesome if we could "fix" this, and I'm willing to help if I can!
I have to say I'm not sure how long I can keep the 21xx PS3, as it belongs to a friend of mine ...

(Thanks for reading this slur till the end :D)
 
I know this is old but i will chime in with a similar problem. It seems something about the encryption/decryption changed with the 2100 series.

I cannot for the life of me get my two FAT consoles to play DVDs that were not meant for the specific region of origin. My A unit from HK doesn't play anything outside Asia coding and my C from Germany doesn't play anything outside Europe coding. However, my 2104B also from Germany does just play everything i throw at it.
 
cha0shacker said:
I know this is old but i will chime in with a similar problem. It seems something about the encryption/decryption changed with the 2100 series.

I cannot for the life of me get my two FAT consoles to play DVDs that were not meant for the specific region of origin. My A unit from HK doesn't play anything outside Asia coding and my C from Germany doesn't play anything outside Europe coding. However, my 2104B also from Germany does just play everything i throw at it.
Click to expand...

Talk to @Evilnat via twitter, he patched the ps3 region lock for ps3 games, he can try to find a way for dvds
 
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This is really good info. I have a PAL 2008 80GB PS3 (The LittleBigPlanet bundle one) and it seemingly only works with changing Blu-Ray regions as well (as far as I know. I changed it from Europe to US and one of my Region B locked Blurays didn't play correctly while being changed to a US system). Now I know what kind of system to be on the lookout for.
 
Last edited:
cha0shacker said:
Thanks, funnily enough for my physical PS2 games it actually worked changing the region from Hong Kong to Europe. BluRays work as well. Just the damn DVDs don't want to play nice.
I just wrote him.
Click to expand...
It's very possible that the PS3's Blu-Ray drive is similar to PC drives in the regard that DVD region protection is enforced at the drive's firmware. On a PC, if the drive's region does not match the disc's then the drive will refuse to read the CSS encryption keys, making the movie unplayable even if the player software is designed to ignore region protection (unless it cracks the keys, which is what AnyDVD does).
Anyway that protection at the firmware level is only for DVD videos. Blu-Ray region protection is implemented at the software level, which is why most open source players (e.g. VLC) are indeed region free for Blu-Ray videos.
If the PS3's Blu-Ray drive is somewhat based around a PC Blu-Ray drive it is possible that it has that DVD region enforcement in its own firmware, which would explain the situation - If you change the DVD region it will affect the PS3 firmware but not the drive, so the PS3 will try to read the DVD but the drive will refuse. Blu-Ray movies, as well as games' region protections are all implemented in software, so changing the region via CFW does work.
 
NiQ said:
It's very possible that the PS3's Blu-Ray drive is similar to PC drives in the regard that DVD region protection is enforced at the drive's firmware. On a PC, if the drive's region does not match the disc's then the drive will refuse to read the CSS encryption keys, making the movie unplayable even if the player software is designed to ignore region protection (unless it cracks the keys, which is what AnyDVD does).
Anyway that protection at the firmware level is only for DVD videos. Blu-Ray region protection is implemented at the software level, which is why most open source players (e.g. VLC) are indeed region free for Blu-Ray videos.
If the PS3's Blu-Ray drive is somewhat based around a PC Blu-Ray drive it is possible that it has that DVD region enforcement in its own firmware, which would explain the situation - If you change the DVD region it will affect the PS3 firmware but not the drive, so the PS3 will try to read the DVD but the drive will refuse. Blu-Ray movies, as well as games' region protections are all implemented in software, so changing the region via CFW does work.
Click to expand...
I thought so as well, but changing the drive itself to a European model also didn't help. So it still has to be something else.
 
wolf_re said:
Sooo I have this mystery to solve :D

I bought my PS3 quite a while ago and the model that I got is a CECH-2004a (the 1st slim model 120 gb). Around the time the exploit came out I jailbroke it and everything was peachy. Except it was not DVD region free (see details further down). The bluray region could be switched as intended but the DVD region was locked to (DVD region) 2. That was not a big deal for me as I do have a stand alone region free DVD and BD player, and I bought the PS3 for gaming.

A while back used PS3s got really cheap and two of my friends also bought one (same model as mine). We also jailbroke both consoles. In both cases they are locked to DVD region 2, and bluray region can be freely changed (same as mine).

So I briefly spent some time googling around (also searching this forum) and came up mostly empty. No one seems to actually know what is going on, and discussion mostly ends without any progress:
https://www.psx-place.com/threads/dvd-region-free-playback-help.1664/page-2
(Maybe my google-fu just isn't good enough ...)

Meanwhile the PS3s got even cheaper and two more consoles landed at my place for jailbreaking from another friend. This time both were CECH-2104b (the 2nd slim model 250 gb). After jailbreaking we noticed that those were not only bluray region switchable but in fact dvd region free!

Wait what?!
So I confirmed this with DVDs from various regions, stuff I had lying around was from DVD region 1, 2, 3. All of them worked (see further down for details on the discs I tried)! For the record I did not try an RCE DVD.

The first thing I did was look around on the https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3 for the differences between the two models (awesome knowledge base BTW). Here are the highlights I came up with (based mostly on https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Bluray_Drive#Bluray_Drive_Revisions ):

Next I made sure both my 20xx and my friends 21xx console have the same SW on them.
Here's what's installed right now:
  • Rebug 4.86.1 - Light (md5 a2c79919cafdbb50ccb5ee9589245380)
  • multiMAN 04.85.01 BASE 20191010 (md5 06bcd1c3f4469a4e618c8937811c5753)
  • webMAN MOD 1.47.25.10 (md5 57067ef79837c78f2aaa02fab381a472)

I installed the above on the 21xx right after JB, and all settings (cobra / QA flag / etc) are untouched defaults.
For my 20xx I did first update Rebug (had 4.84.2 on it), then uninstall webMAN and multiMAN, then reinstall rebug tool box, then install multiMAN then install webMAN. I briefly went over the CFW settings on the 20xx and they should be the same as on the 21xx (I did not left/right compare them). Concerning the language selection that you get on a freshly reset console (mentioned in the above linked thread):
  • I did that with mine after I got it and chose English / UK. Not sure how I got there, but probably a combo of format util and something in recovery.
  • I did that with the 21xx, the console did ask me for this on first boot and I chose the same.
However I do not think that makes any difference, as DVD region 2 is valid all across Europe and Japan. So mapping from a language to a DVD region does not really work. Concerning the DVD region selection on either webMAN or multiMAN, none of them do anything for the 20xx console(s). I did not try messing with that on the 21xx, its set to default.

So how does trying to play a DVD look like?
On the 21xx the DVD region is set to "Default" (both in multiMAN and webMAN). I just throw in any of the test DVDs and it plays from the XMB without any additional steps. That means the 21xx is truly DVD region free (as compared to the BD region which can be switched, but is not "free" as such). Doing the same on the 20xx for a non-supported region (details further down) will boot up the DVD player application same as 21xx. However in the DVD player app, after a brief flash of the "I'm doing stuff" indicator (clock/circle upper right corner), it will display this message: "This disc cannot be played. The region code is not correct." Which only offers a "back" option that will stop the player app and get you back to the XMB again. I vaguely remember that on an OFW XMB would already refuse to start the player app, however I may be mistaken (can anyone confirm this?).

Here's the selection of DVDs I tried:
  • R1 with CSS ("The Negotiator" Warner 085391675020)
  • R2 with CSS ("Startup" UFA 743218968792)
  • R3 with CSS ("Mad monkey Kungfu" IVL 4891670105142)
  • R3 no CSS ("Wheels On Meals" Fortune Star 4895074412226)

I verified each discs region using IfoEdit, looking at the actual settings on the DVD to be sure. Each disc was only enabled for a single region, however not each disc had CSS. I verified CSS by not using a proper DVD player, by using cat to pipe a VOB into ffplay. This does prevent any authentication from happening between the player (ffplay) and the drive. Doing so on CSS discs will just fail to play any video.

All 4 discs worked in the 21xx machine right from XMB, as described above. Popping in those discs into the 20xx revealed some interesting findings (all tested with the above mentioned software versions):
  • R2 with CSS worked, as expected that is the region this PS3 is coded for
  • R1 and R3 with CSS failed with the above "region not correct" message
  • R3 without CSS worked, this was unexpected :playful:

So my conclusion from all this is:
The whole "software side" of things (XMB/OS and player app) are in fact region free. This is based on the fact that both 20xx and 21xx consoles run the same software now and both boot up the player app. AFAIK CSS and regions are tied together not only in the SW player but also the HW/FW of the drive. The drive is only supposed to volunteer its part of the CSS decryption process / key when the disc region matches its intended region. This is what's called a "RPC Phase II drive" according to Wikipedia. So either the drives/BMD/FW in the two 21xx were "RPC Phase I" / RPC1. Or what ever is at work in Rebug/multiMAN/webMAN doing magic with the drives/BMD/FW is not working with the combination in 20xx models. I think it is the latter as I don't think RPC1 drives were "just sold" for personal use and not in a very popular game console ... but that is conjecture.

So my understanding is that COBRA is doing all this stuff with the drive, but I may be wrong here ...
Can anyone with detailed knowledge comment on this?
Can I supply any logs to maybe further analyze this?
Feel free to ask for any details I missed (probably a lot).
It would be awesome if we could "fix" this, and I'm willing to help if I can!
I have to say I'm not sure how long I can keep the 21xx PS3, as it belongs to a friend of mine ...

(Thanks for reading this slur till the end :D)
Click to expand...

I'm resuscitating this thread in case you ever found a solution. I have a Japanese 2500 model and cannot for the life of me get it to properly ready USA DVDs. As expected, anything blueray movie or game works just fine. But physical Region 1 DVDs simply will load, almost play, and then I get the error you're describing.

I have tried:
- the multiman and webman region changes on the latest Evilnat CEX
- Installing PEX going into DEX changing region there
- Updating the IDPS with the idps edit tool so it's x84 for USA (I really thought this would crack it, it didn't)
- Installing a USA optical drive
- Remarrying both USA and JP optical drives after dumping the id_rootkey (per the optical drive remarrying process)
- Using a new hard drive after I switched the console to the correct region
- Went into xregistry.sys to check on the parameters and they were all correct
- I even gave up and tried to just use movian, but it won't read optical media

Have you made any progress here? The only interesting result I got is that when I tried to play the disc while in DEX I got an error message related to "cinavia" protection? There's a cinavia removal tool compatible with older CFW I even downgraded to it, applied the cinavia removal, no dice. I've also followed the MrMario tutorial on youtube which uses older CFW rebug, but nothing. I'm completely
 
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