XBox 360 DVD region hack

posted Jul 20th 2007 5:56pm by Will O'Brien
filed under: xbox hacks

[XanTium] sent this in a few days ago, but I thought you guys would dig it. Here are the details straight from his email:

Hackers on the XBH forums managed to change DVD key and Game Region Code in the Xbox 360 ‘Key Vault’ (that stores on flashchip: console certificate(s), per-box private keys, DVD key, however NOT any code-related encryption keys).
However you should know the ‘Key Vault’ is encrypted with the per-xbox360 ‘CPU key’, so that means this hack is only possible on Hypervisor exploitable Xbox360s (kernel 4532 and 4548) for now. You will of course also have to read/flash the Xbox360 flashchip (by desoldering it and read/flash it with programmer or for example use the versatile Infectus dev chip)

You can read up on some more details here or get a login and check out the actual forum thread. The end result: play EU games on your US 360. (It doesn’t sound like the DVD movie region has been successfully changed, but modded DVD players are easy to make.)

Comments [6]

Reader Comments

hackaday and gmail – competing for the longest running “beta” status of all time!

Posted at 7:49 pm on Jul 20th, 2007 by lain

i agree with #1.

but, this is a good hack. other than the fact that you have to desolder/flash/resolder even though we all could do that with ease. but where to get a cheap programmer?

Posted at 1:12 am on Jul 21st, 2007 by apple

my 4 yr/old maxtor 160gb diamondmax plus just died…

upon further inspection i see burned out caps on the underside :o – anyone have a replacement power board for it?!

Manchester, UK… – will pay of course!

I also agree with post 1 :D – very long beta :D

Chris L

Posted at 7:05 am on Jul 21st, 2007 by chris

You should be able to replace caps on the controller board fairly easily, I’ve done it on a few occasions. Tedious but not impossible.

Good luck!

Rob

Posted at 3:07 pm on Jul 21st, 2007 by Rob

I don’t know about you guys, and girls, but I personally boycott forums and websites who make registering mandatory just to view images, and forum posts. It’s a like a nasty little marketing gimmick -hey..like spam.

You can probably find more technical forums and mailing lists on reverse engineering the firmware anyway. I find discovering software bugs in embedded devices just as intriguing as the next person, but screw registering just to read a forum, the information isn’t -that- significant.

Posted at 5:35 pm on Jul 23rd, 2007 by TJHooker

Yes! but do you have any guesses?

Posted at 2:10 am on Jul 26th, 2007 by Corissa