Aargh! RPC-2 and Matsushita DVD-RAM drives (on the ferrari)

It’s a sin, the Matshita DVD-RAM drive is not supported by DVD Idle Pronor do they ever plan to, according to their web site. This means that I can’t watch arbitrary DVD’s on the laptop – which relaly tees me off. Intervideo has already eaten 3 region changes, it changed to region 1 last night while I was watching the great irken invasion (all hail invader zim!). I need to find out more about this mysterious drive and why it’s not supported – DVD Idles ability is unaffected on my desktop – I can read DVD’s without any problem, it’s just the bloody laptop that’s an issue. Time to go crawling the web in a big way.
Well that’s a kick in the knuts, it looks like the dvd firmware is encrypted, based on the information from Cynikal’s superdrive page. With that piece of news I officially declare shenanigans on Matsushita/Panasonic shame on you for really driving me insane with this. Mind you, I think there is some form of history in the drive – I changed the region to region 4, and I was able to still read all my region 2 disks, however when I changed it to region 1, I lost the ability to read my region 2 disks, unfortunately I’ve not got access to my region 4 disks this weekend, so I can’t check them.
I’m just gong to have to stick to my dell laptop for reading DVD’s then, which sucks rocks, as it’s just not as nice.