Can't play commercial DVD on XP Pro

[Heather Mills]

I bought an instructional DVD. When I put it in the DVD player on my
laptop, Windows Media Player starts up, but then says it cannot play
the DVD because a compatible DVD decoder is not installed on my
computer.

I have WMP 11 on Win XP Pro.

After a little research, it appears that the problem is that WMP 11
does not come with any codecs and I need to find one somewhere. Some
sources said that WMP 9 did have codecs.

Is this all true?

Can anyone recommend a good codec and where to get it? Are there any
free ones? Is there a commercial one that is better?

Or should I go back to WMP 9? And how do I do that?

Or is there a better program for playing DVDs than WMP (free or
commercial)?

Thanks

[Heather Mills]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 22:22:11 -0800, Heather Mills <hsm...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

After a little more research, I found 4 commercial and several free
plug-ins for WMP. I'd appreciate any comments, pro or con, on any of
these:

This Microsoft site lists 4 commercial plug-ins:

http://tinyurl.com/2auxhjj

They are:

1. http://tinyurl.com/yurrjd, Roxio, $15

2. http://tinyurl.com/6za72v6, Corel DVD+AVCDH pack, $25

3. http://tinyurl.com/dmusjp, Cyberlink PowerDVD, $15

4. http://tinyurl.com/675c3, Nvidia PureVideo, $20-$50

The free plug-ins include:

1. http://tinyurl.com/5wohthk, VLC, 2.1 MB

2. http://tinyurl.com/48nz52k, Play It All, 546 KB

3. http://tinyurl.com/66hzu5u, uPlayer, 23.3 MB

4. http://tinyurl.com/qoqltq, GOM (via cnet), 7.4 MB

The sizes of the download files vary wildly.

[brush-head]

You might consider trying Real Player free edition or any of the other free
players e.g. Open source songbird isn't bad. Not sure if they come with
relevant codecs, usually WMP says which codecs are missing.

"Heather Mills" <hsm...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
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