I recently bought "The Beautiful South - Munch Our Hits" from Morrisons.

The DVD plays fine on my DVD player, but it won't play on my PC. The drive spins round for a few seconds before giving up. MY COMPUTER thinks the drive is empty. I've no problem playing other disks.

I've installed ANYDVD on trial to no avail.

Anyone got any suggestions ?



Thanks in anticipation


Bananaman

Try this, download the free, standard version: Zoomplayer. If that doesn't work, and you are really serious about this, try this to identify what codec you are missing: AVICodec If still no joy, I would return the DVD.

does the disc show up at all in my computer???

update your firmware but be careful , if you do it wrong it may damage your cd/dvd drive

VLC Media Player plays dvd's and about any multimedia audio and video format.

http://www.videolan.org/

i use vlc but had to turn off Data Execution Prevention to play 5.1, 24 bit DTS stereo. then had problems with the program crashing but it works great for DVD.

Another freeware DVD player is Media Player Classic.

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Media_Player_Classic.htm.

this one may be better than VLC.
no codecs required for either player.

I wouldn't mess with the codecs on machines. They will cause you serious errors and could force a reformat. Download a standalone player that has all the codecs included into the player.

We appreciate your input, and to an extent you are correct; some users have downloaded dozens of codecs to their computer thinking that the more the better in order to play EVERYthing. Unfortunately, more sooner than later, they begin conflicting with each other and cause problems. It is highly doubtful that they would corrupt the operating system enough to warrant a reformat but they could be a serious pain.

There is no such thing. Any player available today will not use every codec available, that would be dozens. Or, if you mean a player that is as close to universal as possible and has the most commonly used codecs, then Zoom Player is the one you want (as I recommended) and Media Player Classic is also very respected as Surfer suggested. I have found little difference between the two, and in the years I have been using Zoom it has only once played a video that MP Classic would not play. I just like the slick interface of Zoom, and it will play full screen with black background. As a side thought, either of these are far superior to WMP in my opinion.

My comment: AVI Codec does not install codecs, it just identifies what codecs are needed for any given video you are trying to run. If the video needs a certain codec and you don't have it, it goes logically that there will be no conflicts with other codecs. AVICodec is not infallible and occasionally will not recognize the video, but many times it is a big help.