Flashing the optical drive before you use all of the region changes will allow you to have a region free optical drive. You also need to note that when the drive is hard locked to the last set region forever, even trying to flash to a region free won't help.
However, you will waste a change when you set the region back to the local region to watch DVDs from your place. Every DVD player allows you to change the region code to up to 5 times before it locks on the last set region. VLC will play DVDs from any region when the firmware on the drive is unlocked to region free. You can try another DVD drive or get a muti-region/region-free DVD drive. To use VLC play DVDs from Region 2, 4, other regions, you can:
