I recently decided I would tuen my laptop into my TV as wel as my DVD player and Freeview broke in one week, I'm fine with getting all that sorted BUT when changing the region on my laptop DVD player a few days ago it told me I have limited amount of changes, now, is this just media player or is this the actual dvd player and most importantly, is there a way around this, it's very important whatever I use to watch DVD's is multi-region, I'm too impatient to wait till American programmes come out over here! Any help will be most appreciated

As I understand it you 'may' be able to download and install modified firmware for your DVD drive to make it multi-region - but it may also kill the drive!.

It's the DVD drive that has a limited number of changes.

One simple risk-free solution is to use an alternative media player such as the excellent VLC Media Player. It's region free so it will play anything regardless of the region setting on the drive.

Thank you very very much, that is exactly what I shall do!!

The DVD Drive, the DVD playback software and Windows are all set to lock to last region after 5 changes.

You can download modified firmware for the DVD drive, so that it's multi-region and no affected by region changes.

There's also software like DVD Idle Pro that runs in the background, so you can use what ever DVD player software you like. It also handles the drive, but it's always best to patch the drive just in case software doesn't kick in.