My Dell PC was built around 1999 with a Windows 98-SE operating system. It came equipped with a DVD tray and DVD-player software, which was a fairly cutting-edge feature at the time. Of course the only DVDs available then were commercially produced movies and such; home-burned DVDs were unheard of.
Well, a friend of mine recently burned me a DVD (on a Sony DVD-R Ver. 2.0/1X-8X disk, if that matters). My PC does not recognize or play it. I know the disk is not faulty because it plays on my newly-purchased stand-alone DVD player that’s hooked-up to my TV.
Can my PC be made to play the new DVD – say, with a software upgrade? Or is it a hardware issue that can only be resolved with a new equipment purchase?
Extra Credit Question: If all I need is a software upgrade, is there a decent brand of DVD player freeware out there that would do the trick and save me some bucks too?
What is the model number of the DVD-drive? One could look it up on videohelp.com.
If the drive is unable to read the disc, get a new drive. Thay’re inexpensive; today I saw a store advertising a drive that can burn DVD+/- R/RW dual layer for $60 Canadian.
I had disks I could burn but not “play”. They worked fine for data but couldn’t seem to handle music. I bought some new disks (Phillips), and they work fine for data and music. RMMV.
On a Windows box, go to the Control Panel, open the System icon, select the Hardware tab, when open the Device Manager. The Device Manager gives a tree-list of the hardware in your computer. Look under “DVD/CD-ROM drives”. The model number should be listed there.
(These steps may vary on different versions of Windows. At any rate, the informatin should be in the Hardware section of the computer’s System properties.)
Or you could disconnect the power, open the computer, unplug the drive, loosen its mounting screws, slide it out, and look at the label.
There are at least five different types of recordable DVD disk: DVD-RAM, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD-R. DVD-RAM was basically a failed experiment, and you don’t see it much any more.
Of the remainder, none is precisely equivalent to a commercial DVD disk, like you’d find a movie on. DVD readers, therefore, will read a subset of these formats, where the particular subset varies from reader to reader and sometimes even from writer to writer and disk to disk. Most modern computer DVD writing drives will read and write all of them. DVD reading -only drives tend to be more like movie DVD drives - they’re inconsistent about what they’ll read.
It’s not unusual for a DVD reader on a device to fail to read a “burned” DVD from another because of this, and usually a software upgrade won’t help.
Note for people who are saying to themselves “At least they wouldn’t be stupid enough to do this AGAIN, right?” – wrong. The industry has currently divided over what format will be used for high-definition DVD movies, the current leaders being “HD-DVD” and “Blu-ray”. Of course, neither side will give in to the other (there are licensing and patent dollars at stake), and they can’t be read in the same drive (at least not with the same lasers), so we get to put up with this nonsense for at least one more device generation. Grrr.