Windows media player cannot play this DVD
Windows can be such a pain. Really it can. A month or so ago I had my hard drive fail on an old desktop PC. I restored the original OEM disks onto a new hard drive. It was old enough that it actually came with discs, imagine that.
Well, I don’t use that system too often, but I was working on it today and decided to pop in a DVD while I was working and what do I get but some bizarre Windows media player message. Apparently I hadn’t tried playing a DVD since the hard drive failure.
The message said…
Windows Media Player cannot play this DVD because there is a problem with digital copy protection between your DVD drive, decoder, and video card.
Then it instructed me to go look for a new driver for my video card. Really? That makes no sense, so I quickly Googled it and saw a lot of other people had the same problem.
People were saying you could download codecs to decode the DVD, but then I thought, well I shouldn’t need to download codecs, because my system came with Power DVD.
And then I thought, wait a sec, why is Windows Media Player trying to play this anyway, it should have been Power DVD. That is what I always use.
I ejected the disc, and then stuck it back in to get the autoplay dialog to make sure Power DVD was restored when I put in the new hard drive. Sure enough, Power DVD was listed as the first option, I hadn’t imagined it. I clicked on “play this DVD with Power DVD”, and instead Windows Media Player popped up with the error again. I specifically told it to play it with something other than Windows media player and it totally ignored what I, the user, requested and tried to play it with Windows media player. Unbelievable. Things like this are what I really really really hate about Windows.
So I closed media player, opened power DVD using the start menu, and the DVD played just fine. I didn’t need to install new drivers for my video card or anything, so the problem wasn’t with my codecs, it wasn’t with my video drivers, it was with an overzealous operating system ignoring what I told it to do.