Flashing BIOS on an optical drive

So, I know that a lot of optical drives are the same thing with different labels and firmware.  I also know that it's possible to turn certain low-end optical drives into high-end drives by flashing the bios, replacing the low-end firmware with the better version.  The question I have is: how exactly do I go about doing this?  (Yes, I did google it.)

What sort of features are you expecting to unlock by doing so? Faster read/write times? Any modern drive is fast enough. DVD region code removal? That at least is a reason to risk it, though there are software-based bypasses now.