I know a lot of you have been thinking: "Boy, I hope those Sopranos DVDs Chris ordered from the US play OK", since Amazon.com did warn about new, 'enhanced' region coding - meaning a Region 1 (US) disc might not play on my multi-region player here in little old Region 4 (see The dollar is high: let's go shopping).

Well, they played fine on my multizone player.

Resident DVD expert Scott E Dawg speculates that 'enhanced' region coding is just a con to scare people away from importing discs from outside their region (where discs may be cheaper, or available before the studio wants your part of the world to see them).

The Sopranos discs didn't play on my Sony Vaio laptop's DVD player, but then it's only Region 4-compatible so I wouldn't have expected them to anyway.

If you're moving up to a Blu-Ray drive, in your PC or living room, note that studios are taking the advent new high definition formats to re-introduce the Region coding system (the HD-DVD camp is doing so to, though much less staunchly) - so don't chuck away your bung old $149 multi-region DVD player just yet.