I've spent hours reading through threads online, but am not as computer savvy as a lot of people, and so am hoping to get some 'plain talk' (i.e., simple for the non-techie here.) in answer to a question. I want to play DVD's from multiple regions on my macbook (circa 2006), but this is posing problematic. I've tried doing the VLC thing, but it won't actually work (read that it only works sometimes) to play regions other than what I'm already set at anyway.

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I have a DVD player that will play any region, and was thinking that an adequate fix would be to connect it. I do also have a sony videorecorder (model dcr-trv18) that it seems I may be able to use to convert the signal into digital. Here's where things get fuzzy, because I have the impression this should work from all of my reading, but can't quite figure out how. We are also open to buying an external DVD drive and just hooking it up, but I can't really find a definitive answer anywhere about whether this will work since my macbook seems to have these two different region locks. I'm so not tech-savvy, but I really want to make this work! It just doesn't seem fair to me to require a different device for each region that I travel to, when I'm buying DVD's legitimately.

I'm really not lazy. I've spent at least 30 hours reading posts, calling stores and other tech people I know. Most of them don't know mac, just windows, and so recommend all sorts of things that haven't worked. The rest of the people (primarily at tech stores) tell me it simply can't be done. It is the firmware in the DVD drive on the MacBook that holds the region lock. Normally you can change the region lock up to 5 times, after that it is permanently locked to that Region.

Generally DVD players that can play multiple regions have had the firmware flashed (hacked) to allow it to play disks for different regions. It is possible that the DVD drive in your Macbook could be flashed as well, I suggest you do your own research as someone providing specific advice may be breaching forum rules here. Unfortunately you will not be able to easily connect a consumer DVD player to your MacBook to watch DVD's as the MacBook has no direct video in capability. There are ways to use a video encoder to convert it into a DV stream that you could then record with a program like iMovie, but I don't think that is what you are after.

Your MacBook Air has an HDMI OUTPUT port. It does not accept HDMI input. You can connect a USB or thunderbolt DVD/CD drive to your Mac. External CD Drive, Deepow USB 3.0 Slim External DVD Drive, Portable CD/DVD-RW Drive Writer Rewriter Burner High Speed Data Transfer for Desktop Laptop Notebook Windows7/8/10, Mac OSX (Black).

Edit - Just re-read your original post, a Multi Region external drive (not a consumer DVD player) should work as the lock is on the firmware on the drive itself.