This wonderful device for budget HD movie watching, whilst was always region free for HD DVD discs, can now be made region free for SD DVDs with some modified firmware. This means upscaling of your DVD collection to 1080p regardless of DVD region. 🙂

Many thanks to those involved in getting the mod working.

To get this to work you need to apply some firmware that has the region free mod in it. The firmware currently available is version 1.3, which is older than latest firmwares available. However once the mod is applied, you can safely update to new official firmware releases without losing the region free status.

Also, if you have more recent firmware (up to 4.0 at least), you can roll back to the modified 1.3 and then re-apply firmware updates.

More details over at the AV Forums: EP35 Region Free Firmware

Note that RCE encoded discs require an extra handset hack as follows:

RCE HACK.
1) Turn on player
2) Open tray, put disc in tray but don´t close
3) Push T.search on remote
4) Push 1, 3, 9 and “Region number” (e.g. 1 for US discs)
5) Push T. search on remote.

6) Press PLAY on the remote

When player is turned off, this setting is cleared.