scottthorn

Recipes 

VLC is an absolute *MUST HAVE* application. It'll play pretty much any kind of media file you throw at it - audio and video. And you can't beat the price!

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McCall St. Brewer

Recipes 

To answer some of the questions:

Windows has recently been re-installed. The hard drive puked and had to be replaced.

The only type of dvd's that I have ever played on the computer are commerical movies. It used to play them fine. Then it would play certain movies but not all of them. Now it won't play any of them.

It does play cd's with no problem, though.

I have not tried cleaning the drive, but if dirt were the problem, wouldn't it have trouble with cd's, too?

Brew Runner

Recipes 

CDs have a larger data structure than DVDs so they are less prone to errors from crud on the disk or lens.

All I can figure is that your disc drive lense is dirty, the driver is problematic, or the drive itself is going bad. I have not yet experienced a similar problem.

McCall St. Brewer

Recipes 

Well, tried VLC, but that didn't help. I guess I'll try getting one of those cleaner gadgets next.

If not, how hard is it to put in a new drive on a notebook? Can it be done at home?

JimC

Recipes 

Before you waste a bunch of cash on new gizmo's and hardware boot up a live linux distro (such as Knoppix) and test the drive. Its dead simple to try and will tell you for sure if you have a hardware problem or not. Proprietary hardware for a laptop is going to cost you a small fortune.

pahiker6

Recipes 

McCall, when you say that the drive won't play DVD's, do you mean automatically upon inserting the disc? Have you tried going into Windows Explorer and "exploring" that disc/drive yet? I would give that a try too.