The first part is finding if there is a firmware upgrade/delivery package for OS X which I am sure there is I have never looked. I once update an old SR-8175 DVD-8x drive to region free which performed flawlessly from all reports, it was a friend's IBM ThinkPad T21 mind and that had the floppy drive booting so it wasn't too difficult. I'm not sure if the 15' PB in question is the superdrive version, but if it's the combo version it's likely to be a Matsuhita (sp?) (Panasonic) mechanism which the region-free firmware is fairly prevalent for them.

Only issue is that most firmware update programs are for PC's either through Windows or as a 16bit DOS application. The only way I can envisage doing this firmware update is probably command-s on startup for single user mode with the correct firmware on the hard disk and the firmware update program. Obviously you'll need to massage it in order to isolate that part into something you can use, but I think that this code will be a useful starting point.You need to have updated the drive's firmware for that to work which is possible. I ran this on my Macbook Pro and the result was as expected. Printf('number of region changes left: %hhu ', DVDInfo.numberUserResets) Printf('drive region %#hhx ', DVDInfo.driveRegion) ProcessCDB(task, cdb, 12, DirIn, &DVDInfo, sizeof(DVDInfo), 30000) More specifically, the interesting case is the one where the disk name isn't found (because there's no disk mounted) and a SCSI command is used to find out the DVD drive's properties (the printf calls are my addition): task = (*scsitaskinterface)->CreateSCSITask(scsitaskinterface) Looking at it I found that the ScanAll method in Region X.m is what you need. Region X is more interesting because although it doesn't directly serve your purpose, its source is available. 1: Canada, the United States, and their respective territories. 0: Playable in all regions, or 'region free' (cannot be set by regular consumer software). DVD Info X will display the region code of your drive without requiring to have a DVD inserted. DVD drive region is a setting that limits DVD-ROM optical drives to playing back video DVDs that are coded to a specific geographical region.

I found some utilities that are capable of dealing with DVD region settings on OS X: DVD Info X, and Region X.

Mac dvd drive region alert