ibook g4 locked on foreign dvd region - god please help me

I just bought my friends ibook g4 and am very happy with it, i'm now a mac convert. The only problem is that my friend made the terriblem mistake of changing the DVD region for the final time...now it is stuck on a foreign region. The DVDRW drive is a MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-825. From my understanding of reading forums so far, it is virtually impossible to have these drives reset as there is no firmware available for the UJ-825 model. As far as i can tell the drive should have no problem reading data dvd's or writing dvd's, i just can't watch any dvd's from my country (new zealand). I figured i have two options

1) replace the internal drive
2) buy an external DVD drive

I figured that since there is nothing really wrong with my drive (it still writes DVD's) then a cheap external drive would be the best option. However I am a little confused as to what the best setup would be. Would it be possible to get some kind of cheap external DVD reader to read the DVD and use my internal one for writing DVD's or should i buy a good external DVD drives with writing capabilities. Ideally i would want to be able to watch DVD's (through the external drive) and also use it to copy them (but possibly use the internal DVD drive to write them if I just have an external DVD reader). Would it be possible to use a regular DVD player hooked up to my G4 for this? If I do get an external DVD drive will I have to ensure that it comes with certain writting of viewing software?

Any help anybody could give me on any of these quetions would be greatly appreciated as i'm still learing the ways of the mac.

If you're prepared to invest some time, you can just rip DVD's to your harddrive minus the regional encoding using mactheripper.

You can then watch them in DVD player without any problems.

Sorry No Advise, just a welcome from another Kiwi.