disclaimer: dvd playing software is discussed below. Anything you mention in this thread needs to be 100% legal in the U.S., so let’s keep it clean, or this thread will get locked. And no one wants that.
Hi all,
Please tell me what software you use to play dvds on your computer. I have researched the crap out of dvd playing software for PCs (or Mac, if you want to share anyway.) I’m thoroughly desperate for something, anything, that works.
Apparently, dvd decoding software is not free, and I probably need to make a purchase. This is fine, but I just need something that will work on my damn machine.
I’ve tried several different trial versions of various players, to no avail. They either messed up my system (Intervideo Home Theater) or didn’t work (VLC dvd player.)
I looked through the shareware sites and got quoted all these $30 prices. Then I remembered that everything is for sale on ebay. I got PowerDVD for about $10, shipped. I like it fine. You can hit N for next chapter, F for forward, B for back, P for previous chapter, space bar for pause/play. No problems. I don’t know how it would interface with your home theater.
I also got a Norcent DVD player that even plays mpgs and Divx and Xvid files. It rocks. I used Buy.com.
I use a registered copy of Power DVD, too. I just discovered the other day, that it will also play DVDs in PAL format, which my player in the living room will not do.
Now, MPC doesn’t come with its own DVD decoder, but my Dell PC also came with Dell’s reskinned version of PowerDVD, and that includes an mpeg-2 (DVD) decoder.
But, even so, i’m not sure that my MPC is actually using the PowerDVD decoder when i play DVD movies. I also have ffdshow, which is a free directshow decoding filter that also installs an mpeg-2 decoder on your system.
So, MPC plus ffdshow should do the trick, and all for FREE.
From what i’ve read on various forums, there are quite a few people in your situation regarding VLC. It is a good player, but it just doesn’t seem to work for some people.
PowerDVD is the most common one I seem to hear/see people using. Legal copies of it are often included with new computers or DVD-drive purchases anyway.
…Sometimes you have to go looking for codecs or whole codec packs–the legality of which is “questionable”. Some codecs–at least a couple I remember–say in their EULAs that you must allow them to install spyware in some regard on your system in order to use their product. There are programs for breaking the functionality of that spyware after the codec is installed, that leave the codec functional. I’m not saying you should do this, just that it is possible.
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That’s one reason why the ffdshow decoding filter that i linked to above is so great. That one download allows you to play just about any video that you’re likely to encounter on the internet (except .ram and .mov files), and gets rid of the need to download and install a bunch of dodgy, malware-ridden codecs.
I’m using the Nvidia Mpeg decoder on my two systems. one is a windows media center system, so I watch DVD’s that way. The other i’m lazy and just use windows Media Player. very happy sofar.
I use PowerDVD currently, but on my last comptuer I used WinDVD (which came with it) and that worked fine. Windows Media Player will play DVDs, but I find it isn’t really designed for that purpose so I don’t use it as such. I haven’t tried it with the Classic version.
You know, I’m with mhendo on this one. I spent ages struggling with windvd’s quirks and occasional weirdnesses. Powerdvd never really appealed to me all that much. Then a few weeks back, I had to get my notebook’s dvd playback capability up for a Halloween party at a friend’s house…and…Media Player Classic did the trick. I don’t think it even requires dvd playback to be preinstalled. It just sorta works.
True, it doesn’t have all of windvd’s neat capabilities, but then again, I don’t really use them either. It also has the benefit of having a much smaller memory/performance footprint than any of the usual commercial bloatware. Even though my computers are fast enough for it not to really matter, I appreciate it.
Macs come with a DVD player app. If for some reason you were having problems with that, say you’re dealing with different audio & video formats that Quicktime can’t handle on its own, or VCDs, etc., or you want to be able to watch a movie directly from a VIDEO_TS folder, I’ve had really good luck with MPlayer OS X and while I haven’t used it, I’ve heard VLC Media Player is good, but it sounds like the OP already tried that.
