A mate of mine, Nigel – the copywriter to the stars, sent me a Region 2 encoded DVD. My AV set-up is good, but the DVD player is dated. It’s a six year old Sony that is locked in to Region 4 and has no software unlock.

I tried the DVD in it anyway, ’cause sometimes R2 play in R4, but it didn’t work. I plonked it in my PC – Windows Media Player asked me to change the DVD drive region, leaving me with 4 changes. I tried it in the DVD burner, same thing. I tried to unlock it with DVD Shrink but that wanted me to change the region too.

Then I tried my least used media player – Real Player (get it from the BBC Real Player download page, it has no spyware or annoying ‘features’ if you get it from here) and it played the disc with no problems.