I had Power-DVD installed with Win98SE on my Compaq Armada M700 which has an ATI RAGE Mobility video card. I also have Power-DVD installed in my desktop because I like having the same programs on both.
So I recently installed Win-XP-SP2 on the laptop and have been reinstalling all the software but when I go to install Power-DVD it says it only has drivers for NVidia Geforce4 which is the video card I have on the Desktop and it will not install with ATI RAGE. So I suppose that disk belongs to the desktop but I cannot find the Power-DVD disk for the laptop. And even if I found it it may be that it only works in Win98se.
So the problem at this point is that I want to be able to view DVDs on the laptop and I have several questions.
I am not sure I understand the whole DVD thing well but why would I need a different player than Media Player Classic or Media Player 2 which is what I use for everything else? Isn’t it just a question of installing the necessary Codec? If not, why not?
If I need to install a software player where can I find one that is free and works reasonably well?
Or can I get the copy I have of PowerDVD to work with the ATI rRAge video card if I get some drivers or som
Well, you could get VLC media player - it’s free and it can play DVDs just fine, though it doesn’t have a DVD decryption codec that could be used with other media players. As I understand it most DVD decryption software has to be licensed from the owners of the DVD format, and so usually is not free. The technology used in VLC is an exception, I suppose. I’m not entirely clear on the details myself.
Media Player Classic should play DVDs just fine. You can go to File > Open DVD, or you can even navigate into the DVD’s folders and double-click on the VIDEO_TS.IFO file (this will only work if you’ve set up MPC as the default player for .IFO files).
As Stealth Potato says, VLC will also work. I have in on my computer, but i prefer MPC; it’s more user-friendly, in my opinion.
By golly, you are right! I have used MPC for a long time but never noticed it could play DVDs. Perhaps because I also use the similar-looking MP2 (V6) which does not. I notice with MPC I cannot fast forward through the initial previews and other assorted junk. I think I could do this with some other players. Anyway, at least for now I can view DVDs on the laptop. Thanks.
By the way, I have different region code players on different computers so I can play different code region DVDs but some years ago I used to extract the video and convert to DivX and generally fiddle with subtitles etc and put the movie on a CD but it seemed like the whole process was just too complicated (I was using Gordian Knot and the other applications with it) and some of the programs started giving problems so I just quit doing it. Is there an easier way to do it now? I like to be able to take a movie when I travel, etc.
It should be able to. If you’ve gone full-screen then right click anywhere and you’ll see ‘Navigate’ listed in the pop-up menu. If you’ve not gone full-screen, then it’s there at the top of the window a few spaces to the right of ‘file’.
Keyboard shortcuts are ‘Alt+r’ for the root menu and ‘Alt+t’ for the title menu.
For easy ripping and converting to a format like divx, xvid or what have you, there are apps like Handbrake, Fairuse Wizard or bitripper.