DVD region encoding and computers, Help!

Another question, though not as glamourous. The computer we have has a DVD that CAN play all regions, however the softwear that it came with is mean and wants to just play English DVDs, when we put in an American DVD it said it would only play DVDs from that region 5 times, which as half of our DVD collection is American (the other half being from Hong Kong or China) this could prove to be a problem. Anyone know of a good way around this?