Cannot play DVD's

I recently replaced the DVD player on my Dell Dimension 8100 because it would not play DVD's with WinDVD or PowerDVD. When I insert a movie the program starts but then stops immediately. I cannot think of why it would not play. The codecs and all should get installed when I install the program, right?

 

hmmm thats a funny one. why dont you try pressing play first?

 

I did hit play smartass. I am not new to this but I have never ran into this problem before and thought someone here would be able to help. I know that if I reinstall the OS it should work but thought there may be another way without reinstalling. Oh well guess I will restore the system.

 

Drtman,
Just curious, are you trying to play DVD’s you made yourself or pre-record movies?
Reason I ask is that I have a Dell Latitude D600 with CD burner / DVD ROM and came with WinDVD 4 which is an edited version of the full program. It would play pre-recorded media without a problem but would hang or not play anything I made even though my disks would play on any of my standalones and other DVD ROM’s. Adding the patch from Dell for WinDVD did not help. I installed and test the full versions of PowerDVD and WinDVD (I have both) which corrected the situation and allowed me to play movies that I authored. (You can download demo’s of both to test with if you do not have full versions.)
Tip I learned this week from this forum if you are making your own DVD’s, try slowing your record speed down.
Hope this helps.

 

I have Win DVD 4 and power DVD and I have no problems with playing a copied disc.I don't know why you can't play one.There should be a button for the win dvd you need to check to play from disc otherwise it will want to play from the hard drive.Win DVD 4 you have to select the files from a file folder and copy them to a drop down window and it plays just fine.

 

The full verisons worked just fine. It was the Dell version of WinDVD 4 that had problems and had been noted by others as well. Dell had released a patch to try to correct the problem but it did little in reality to resolve the problem. The next generation of WinDVD for Dell (v.5) seemed to correct the problem but since I had full versions I just used them instead.