Recommend a DVD player for Win10

In My Humble Opinion
1

Unless it’s well hidden, Windows 10 doesn’t have a native DVD player. My refurbished desktop computer came with a somewhat annoying player, DVD Player+, which played some ads, tried to sell you some stuff, but then let you watch your DVDs in peace.

I just bought some new DVDs to keep me entertained during the coronavirus era, and DVD Player+ won’t play them: I get the ad, then the FBI anti-piracy warning, then the main menu, but it doesn’t move on to actual content from there.

I kinda wanted a better DVD player anyway on my computer, so: any suggestions? Good and free is best, but if it comes to that, cheap but good is better than crappy but free.

2

VLC always (mostly always) works.

3

Looks like I’m in debugging mode here.

These discs (Seasons 2 and 3 of Superstore, if it matters) will play just fine on the DVD player hooked up to my TV, and ditto on my dinosaur of a Toshiba Win7 laptop.

But they won’t play on VLC or DVD Player+ on my Win10 desktop. But other DVDs will play there using either one.

Very strange.

4

Some DVDs are just defective enough that some players can handle them but others can’t.

5

Also, PowerDVD.

6

Yeah, I think I’ll be sending these back to Amazon.

7

The error could be in the actual mastering of the discs and not in your individual copies.

8

You could try ripping the files from the DVD and playing them directly.

9

If the DVDs don’t play on that computer, I doubt that they can be ripped faultlessly on the same machine.

ETA: optical drives, especially their lenses, are very vulnerable to external pollution. I know from my own painful experience as a smoker…

10

Tru dat, but I’d checked out Season 2 from the library awhile back, and had no problem watching the discs on this computer.

11

Back when we only had CD-ROMs and audio CDs, there were cleaning discs for such situations. Do any exist on the DVD level? Heck, could the old CD cleaners work on DVD drives? (I believe that most DVD drives use the same laser for CDs and DVDs.)

12

You can also clean the lens with a Q-Tip and some alcohol or naphtha. On laptop optical drives, the lens is mostly easily reachable because it’s in the tray. On desktop drives, you may have to disassemble the drive to get to the lens.

13

Definitely recommend against naptha. This is a coated plastic lens we’re talking about. A Q-Tip is iffy. Might scratch as well as leave lint behind. A foam swab is better.

14

A new desktop drive or an external USB drive would set you back 20 or 30 bucks. Really not enough to be worth disassembling an internal drive over.

15

You obvious don’t know a lot of people like me who enjoy keeping things running just for the fun of it.

E.g., I had an issue with my first iPod a week ago. Had to open it and secure the “hard drive” cable better. It’s not really a hard drive anymore but a larger solid state drive I put in last year. Plus a new battery. Maybe the 3rd time I put in a new battery.

For a device that came out in 2003.

(FtGKid2 gave me this and a Mini as presents years ago. Both broken. Both fixed and still working. Great gift idea.)

16

Yeah, I’m like that. My desktop computer is from about 2008, one of the first that came out with Win 7 (has been updated to Win 10 a long time ago in the meantime), and it still runs well and serves as my media server for my other devices. I use to keep and maintain my computers until they’re absolute lost cases, and that can take a long time.