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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gottfried who wrote (74095)	2/13/2011 6:16:14 PM
From: Sexton O Blake	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110626

Very odd. Well I went down and found (yeah I actually have commercial DVDs - imagine that!) Gladiator (from the year 2000, in the year two thous-sannnnnnnd - always loved that bit on Conan). Put it in - and though WMP 11 had problems (don't care and probably have never used it to play DVDs) it played without any issues via VLC. I skimmed over things but assume a) You are playing "honest to goodness REAL commercial" DVD - purchased HERE in NA (region 1; NTSC); If it is from another country and not REGION 1, or perhaps PAL - it may not play. Though the region may be a problem, it would play PAL on the PC (but not on most commercial DVD players) b) You have tried more than the suspect one - ie many; c) That you are not trying to play a Bluray in the non-Blueray drive; Assuming YES to all of these - how old is the oldest DVD you are trying? I believe Sony and perhaps it was Paramount (whoever owns the newest Star Trek movie) changed their security protection - as such it is possible they won't play on the computer DVD reader. Go back to say 2005 or so, and if it works, then it is something along the lines with the protection, but if it still doesn't play it is either a faulty DVD drive or perhaps the lens needs cleaning. Though I will say with Star Trek, I had no problems playing it on my computer knowing it had enhanced security. (IMO a dirty lens is suspect - unless you (a) smoke and (b) haven't used it in a LONG LONG time. Normally lens issues are found when you try to burn and compare and the verification fails due to retries. Commercial DVDs are not created the same way we would burn a disc - the quality is extremely high. I read an article regarding the DVDs we burn and it seemed to suggest just how amazing they are to actually work due to the poor quality of the burn.) Maybe something maybe nothing - good luck. PS: If you have a SATA DVD writer, you are talking probably at most $30 to get a replacement (assuming you can do it yourself). Harder to get IDE and Blueray more money. Finally last point - all optical players/writers are JUNK. Very unreliable and have gone through many units failing. Whenever I smell of hint of errors with my DVD writer, I toss it - not worth the energy. Have a DVD player that "skips" a lot - it will cost more to have the optics replaced than to buy a new unit. Just think how precise the head has to move to read and write. B PS: That your problems started with XP SP3 - chuckle - who knows, maybe Hollywood cut a deal with MSFT to release XP3 and cut updates on XP2 just for this alone to make movies not play under WMP. At any rate, as stated my VLC plays fine and I am using XP SP3.