Bought a couple imported UK DVD's of Doctor Who stories that haven't made it to Blu-ray yet. Only realizing after the fact that, while the Blu-ray sets are all region free, the DVD sets were always locked to Region 2 and 4. So it won't play on any of my disc players. I do need to get myself a region free player sooner or later, but that's not an option at the moment.
I learned instead that programs like DVDShrink can remove region coding (along with copy protection) from most all DVD's. However, that region code removing is pretty pointless if the program itself is incapable of opening a DVD with a region code different from the DVD drive.
Fortunately, good ol' DVD Decrypter can do the task just fine, and output an ISO and MDS file which I can then burn to a DVD+R DL and pop it in my player and it goes like no problem!
Still have to deal with BBC's annoying pre-menu bumpers and such that are non-skippable, about 30 seconds of guff before the menu comes up. While I'm not interested in recompressing MPEG-2 video to half it's size to fit on a single-layer DVD (since this DVD already looks... not the best), DVDShrink can apparently also edit things like unskippable commercials, so I might have a use for that program still...
Once I've burned a de-regionlocked and de-copyprotected disc, I can just toss it in a paper sleeve and store it in the case with the original DVD. I'm very smart, yes, thank you. I did stay up until 3 AM figuring all of this out, yes.