An External DVD Drive Question

Hi everyone.

I live in the UK which is Region 2, and I own a lot of Region 1 DVDs. My new Macbook Pro won't play them, let alone copy them. I don't want to change my drive code, I'm not willing to hack the drive, and all the work arounds have failed since it's a recent model and not even VLC will work.

I'm planning to buy a new external USB DVD drive, and simply set it to Region 1 permanantly, and just use it whenever I'm using my Region 1 discs.

My questions are these:

Will it be possible to do this? Can I have one drive as region 2 and the other as region 1, or will it just get grumpy and make me have them both the same?

Will I still be able to copy and burn on this new drive, even though the other one is region 2? Or would there be errors if the data could conflict somehow from the regions being different?

Or does anyone know of an external DVD drive which is automatically region free, much like my friends DVD player (for his TV, though, not a computer.)

I can't help thinking how much better the world would be if these movie production companies dropped DVD regions altogether - oh wait, that'd be too easy.

As far as I know, all of that should work. The system will differentiate between the drives and their settings and work accordingly. The region code is set in the drive itself, not OSX.

Hmmm, so theoretically, I could buy one external firewire DVD player for each region code that I might have DVDs for.

Ha! Take that motion picture industry!

Of course, I'm in America so we usually get 'em all first.

Oh that sounds good, I'm glad to hear it. Before I run out and buy http://www.microanvika.com/product.asp?TXT=INFO&PNO=EDD51429&ref=froogle&cam=EDD51429&key=141985 this, does anyone have any good recommendations? I'm still new at this, so I'd like to be sure they're Mac compatible. Also I'd like Lightscribe with it, that's just cool. If no one knows any better, I'll just get this one. It has the dual layer thing going on and comes with toast.

Thanks for your time, by the way.

I've done this on my Mac. My internal is set to region 4 and my external is set to region 1. I have had no problems.