I have two software DVD players... Nero Showtime and PowerDVD as well as Media Player.
I started with PowerDVD and I really liked this program, but then I installed the Nero suite which included showtime and my PowerDVD started getting picky about the disks it would play.
So, I started using Showtime which worked great... I could play any DVD, Professional or homemade.
Then I aquired a wireless keyboard and decided it would be cool to be able to play DVD's from my computer to my TV but I cannot get Media Player to play my DVD's. I would prefer Media Player because of the special keys on the keyboard that works with Media Player. Media Player simply refuses to play DVD's with a cryptic message saying something about lowering my resolution or some such stupid advice which doesn't really apply to the situation.
So, I gave up on Media Player and tried playing the DVD in Showtime, expecting to have to learn all the keyboard shortcuts in order to play my movie. But Showtime won't play DVD's either!!! All of a sudden it just decided not to play my DVD's.
Now I'm just ticked off.
First, Windows update quits functioning (won't install one of the updates so all the subsequent updates fail as well)
Then, media player says it plays DVD's but doesn't...
And now my DVD players don't function at all!!!
Some data:
Yes, Shrink can read the disks just fine, and the VOB's will play as FILES, but the disk will not play as a DVD.
Yes, I can see all of the files and they are formatted correctly (most are made with Shrink/Nero but store DVD's don't work either)
All the DVD's play fine in my set-top player.
And yes, Showtime and PowerDVD USED to play DVD's just fine. (Media Player has never played DVD's for me)
I will be reinstalling a lot of software to try to solve this issue but I wanted to get this post out to see if anyone has any other insight.
Consider using the hardware manager to uninstall the DVD or the IDE controller and letting XP reinstall the drivers on reboot.
Or boot into safe mode and run PowerDVD and see if a disk will play.
Ok, I spent last evening adressing this issue and I'm now up and running. I installed the K-lite bundle (which is really quite well done)(Download K-lite from Afterdawn) and all of a sudden all of my programs started working again.
In addition, the K-lite bundle includes a program called "Windows Media Classic" which I thought was just the old Windows Media Player but is anything but that! Sure it looks like the old Media Player but the functionality has been greatly increased by enterprising programmers in the open source world (I assume)
My advice to anyone who has this same problem (of which I found many instances of while browsing this forum) Try the K-lite codec pack. It can't hurt.
So now, for the sake of argument here's another question:
Why in the world would this suddenly happen? My DVD players used to work just fine and now I have to have certain codecs installed?
You installed Nero and it's pile of codecs?
Did K-Lite offer to clean up a pile of busted codecs after it installed?
I think it has a codec cleanup tool in the package that can be run separately.
I've had Nero 7 for a while now and it always seemed to work fine. I pretty much only used Showtime and Burning ROM and occasionally the Drive Image thing. But for no reason, my Showtime quit working with DVD's.
And yeah, I ran that program that Windows made that shows your installed codecs. I had alot of red X's and only one checkmark. But why in the world would that be the case? These were not buggy, downloaded codecs. They used to work just fine. I did nothing to upset them.
As for uninstalling them... I'll look into that later. Right now, my system is working and I'm happy.
