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DVD in WinXP?

R

rky60

Golden Member
Does WinXP come with any kind of Software for DVD play? When i put a DVD in my player i get the following:

A compatatible DVD decoder is not installed on your computer

Then to troubleshoot i get directed to Microsoft where they offer DVD playback software for sale. I'm kinda new to all this stuff so if any could explain what i need to do i'd appreciate it 🙂

Check My Computer for Specs below 🙂
 
So your saying i gotta buy one of those ones Microsoft Troubleshooter recommends? Thanx for the info, i thought i had another problem.. LoL 🙂
 
Now it's time for some idiot to criticize microsoft for not including one.

and if they had

another idiot would criticize them for trying to shut out 3rd party dvd players.
 
Ok, maybe im on crack or something, but I had no problem playing DVD's on WINXP Pro after I did an upgrade install. I have just done a full install with XP corp and now I can't play DVD's in Media player. What did I do? At the retail roadshow, the MS guys specifically said that Media player now plays DVDs'.
 
Yes winxp comes with Windows Media Player which can play DVD. To run automatically DVD when inserted, you need to tell the DVD drive what to do. Go to DVD drive property then autoplay menu, after that you know what to do.
 
Haven't tried it but if it doesn't, I guess you can upgrade WMP to v.8 and then apply the patch, making it a region-free. I was told that the patch that I've posted for a download is not from MS (different from the DVD patch available at windowsupdate).
 


<< Ok, maybe im on crack or something, but I had no problem playing DVD's on WINXP Pro after I did an upgrade install. I have just done a full install with XP corp and now I can't play DVD's in Media player. What did I do? At the retail roadshow, the MS guys specifically said that Media player now plays DVDs'. >>



WMP needs a DVD decoder (both audio and video) to play DVDs. All that WMP does, is to provide a outer wrapper to the DVD engine(s) that's already existing on your machine. If you had ATI DVD player (Cinemaster) or WinDVD (Intervideo) or PowerDVD (Cyberlink) or any other DVD decoder engine installed prior to the upgrade to XP, WMP used it. When you did the full install all your older softwares are gone including the DVD decoders hence no DVD playback in WMP.

Hope this clears some confusion.
 
I think the media player in XP only plays DVDs if you have a supported software DVD player already installed on your computer. In this case, support for DVDs might appear to be part of XP and media player, when it was really part of having additional software on the computer. For instance in earlier betas of XP, I was able to play DVD with media player even though my DVD player, PowerDVD, wasn't officially suported, at least the version I had. Later in the beta process, this suppport got worse and I was steered to a website where I could spend $20 and upgrade Power DVD.

Sigma Hollywood Plus works on my XP computer, but I don't use the overlay cable which makes my computer monitor blurry. I pretty much use this hardware decoder when I want to copy ripped DVDs (stripped of macrovision) to my VCR. So the gist of this is that since my version of Power DVD isn't supported, I can't really watch DVD on my XP computer monitor. I am able to pipe this through the hardware decoder to my TV, which is mainly what I want. I have a perfectly acceptable Toshiba DVD connected to my TV, so viewing movies on my computer monitor is not something I do on a regular basis. At some point I'll get another software DVD player that works with XP, but right now I don't want to spend $20 on Power DVD.
 
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