Re: WMP will not play DVD but VLC can play it, no error given

On Apr 5, 4:50 pm, Mike Poz [MSFT]
<MikePozM...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Chris" wrote:
Current version of Windows Media Player will not play one DVD of a set (from
a tv series) but VLC (open source program) can play the same DVD. Other DVDs
in the set work fine.

Chris,

Since you didn't tell us the name of the TV series set I'm unable to check
to see if there are any known publishing issues with that box set. Given
that all but one disc works with WMP, I would initially guess that there's an
issue with that one disc.

Understand that not all DVD decoder/players work the same, even between
commercial players that you pay for you don't always get the same experience,
and since there really is no one authoring standard for DVDs, any time
someone creates a disc with some really cool menu experience, or tries
something that's never been done before, there's no guarantee that it will
work across the board on all software and hardware players.

Please do a websearch on that box set to see if there are any known issues
with that box set, and specifically that disc you're having problems with.
--
Thanks!
Mike Poz [MSFT]

It is impossible to make DVDs or CDs without flaws. Thus starting with
even early CDs, this fact was addressed by recording the same data on
more than one location of the disc so that if one area is faultly,
another area will hopefully work properly. If a scratch or other
defect such as a pinhole in the reflective layer causes faulty data
that can not be read at all, various math calculations are used to
estimate what the missing part should be by taking some sort of
average between what came just before or just after the flaw. If the
defect is too large, even this may not work, and you get a skip,
click, etc. The inner most portion of the disc is very critical,
because here information concerning menus and navigation are stored. A
flaw here that can not be corrected may result in the disc not playing
at all. Various drives and player programs differ considerably in how
they attempt to make corrections.

I have a 4 disc CD box set that had one disc that would not play
properly with bad skips and lock-ups near the end of the disc. This
happened on all computer and stand alone players that I tried. There
are programs that sometimes can rip this sort of flawed disc, and then
you can record this back from the HD to a new disc that will work. I
used Easy CD-DA Extractor that includes a program that will do it.
This program can be very slow as it may repeat reading in a damaged
area many time at a very slow speed, and uses very complicated math
calculations. In my case it took over an hour to rip the damaged CD,
but finally it did. I burned a copy of the CD that worked fine, and
the savings in the cost of having to buy a new 4 disc set more than
paid for the program used. Now DVDs have much more data than CDs, and
I do not have such a program for them. Since your DVD will play on
some players, I think I would try to rip the DVD to the HD using any
DVD ripping programs that you may have, if copy protection does not
prevent this. Although most recent movies are copy protected, you find
a few earlier ones and small studio ones that are not. If you can
rip, then your movie may play properly when recorded from HD to a new
DVD.
If this approach can not be used, you might search for programs to
repair DVDs much as the one I mentioned for CDs. The problem here is
again copy protection, so most companies in the US and Europe would be
afraid to release such a program. Of course there are some places
where defeating copy protection is not illegal, and companies in such
places may have some programs that do - I have no idea of where you
live.

.

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