Codecs WMPlayer incompatibility

MovieExpert wrote on 1/26/2008, 11:35 PM
The DVDs produced by DVD Architect play without any problem on Sony DVD players. When I try to play them on the PC that produced them I get an error message from WMPlayer saying "Windows Media Player cannot play this DVD because there is a problem with digital copy protection between your DVD drive, decoder, and video card. Try installing an updated driver for your video card.". I updated my video card driver, installed an additional decoder, following advice from user groups changed the registry, but the problem is still there. Can anyone help please. Thanks.

Comments

bStro wrote on 1/27/2008, 7:50 AM
Are you rockin' Vista?

I did a Google search and found oodles of Vista (and a few XP) users getting this error, and I suspect not many of them are trying to watch DVDA-produced discs. So we might want to put aside that as the culprit for a second and look at other possibilities first.

Most of the discussions I found had the prevailing suggestion to install a codec pack, which I'm usually not keen about doing if I don't have to. Too many codec packs on a system, and programs can start getting confused. Anytime I've had just the k-lite codec pack installed and nothing else, I've been alright.

But before you try that, my suggestions would to either:

a) use something other than WMP to watch your DVDs. PowerDVD, DVDMax, VLC Player, whatever. Of the people who I saw have this problem with WMP, most said they had no problem with other DVD player apps.

b) If this is WMP 11, look around in Options (or is it Settings?) for a checkbox with a label something to the effect of "Protect my files." I'm still on WMP 10, so I don't know the exact wording. Uncheck the box and see if that helps.

Rob
MovieExpert wrote on 1/29/2008, 9:33 AM
I installed Nero 7 with its video player. Nero video player plays the DVD without any problem. WMPlayer still can not play the DVD. At least I managed to go around the problem. Thanks for the advice.
MPM wrote on 1/31/2008, 5:23 PM
AFAIK the error is not specific to wmplayer 11, but that's AFAIK... If you want to play mpg2 &/or DVDs in wmplayer, I believe the recommended route is to buy a software player that makes available to wmplayer the specific files that it needs. There are separate decoder packs sold, but Cyberlink for example suggests you go the full player route. Since you won't get full playback in wmplayer anyway, IMHO it's kind of moot -- just as well off to stick with the separate players, in your case Nero (which probably still uses Cyberlink code).

As background if interested: for most file types a program is registered in windows to go with the filename extension -- i.e. double click a txt file and it opens in NotePad. Expanding on that sort of association idea, you have codec handling in Windows. For avi files it's relatively easy (in theory anyway), as each type of file has it's own code (fourCC), and the codec associated with that code gets used whenever you play the video file.

Mpg2 OTOH is potentially a nightmare... You have a bunch of Direct Show filters that have to be chained together to show a picture on-screen, plus another chain for non-wav audio. It's possible to have several filters competing for Windows attention, plus some filters actually lie about what files they can handle. Obviously the more mpg2 filters you have installed, the more chances you have for something to go wrong. Since this problem exists for other types of media files as well, so-called codec packs containing all sorts of codecs are often frowned on -- for every duplicate there's a potential conflict. Many players and video programs then keep their codec-related files to themselves and try to be completely self-contained -- installing Nero didn't make critical mpg2 decoding filters available to wmplayer for example. Other software will make it available -- just have to read the fine print.