Thinkpads Forum

I recently reinstalled Windows XP on my GF's Dell D620 using Recovery CD's obtained from Dell. These Recovery CD's included a copy of Cyberlink's PowerDVD 8.0.

She is no longer able to play DVD videos from her hard drive.

I am able to play DVD videos using InterVideo's WinDVD 2000, so I decided to purchase a copy of Corel's WinDVD 9 (Corel purchased InterVideo after the release of WinDVD and installed it on her machine.

Again, she is not able to play DVD videos from her hard drive.

I phoned Corel support. They said, that WinDVD 9 will not play DVD videos copied to her HDD because of concerns over infringements of copyrights.

It appears that the most recent versions Cyberlink's PowerDVD and Corel/InterVideo's WinDVD no longer play DVD videos from a HDD.

Does anyone know which previous releases were the last to play *.VOB files from a HDD?

I would simply download and use VideoLAN - VLC media player. It's free. It's open source. And it plays just about any video file you throw at it from anywhere you throw it

hausman wrote:I would simply download and use VideoLAN - VLC media player. It's free. It's open source. And it plays just about any video file you throw at it from anywhere you throw it

Using InterVideo WinDVD2000 (that came bundled with my IBM system recovery CD's), I can play *.IFO and *.VOB by double-clicking on them in Windows Explorer. I do NOT wish to install my IBM version on my GF's DELL machine.

Using VideoLAN VLC media player, it just plays the video menu over and over again.

My GF uses scenes of movies to illustrate points in the class that she teaches. It is very inconvenient to swap DVD's in and out of her machine's DVD drive while teaching -- especially when she has them embeded in her MS Pointpoint presentations.

The only way that I've been able to get VLC media player to play videos from her machine's HD is to start VLC media player first, and then open the file folder.

Even after creating a playlist in VLC media player, and then creating a short-cut to open the playlist on her desktop, VLC media player generates an error message and then starts the video at the very beginning (instead of starting at the desired chapter).

Any other thoughts?

I don't know if this is relevant, but I have a Blu-ray drive. I have PowerDVD Ultra 7.3, which is the last version of PowerDVD that will play ripped Blu-ray and HD DVD content from the hard drive. I don't know if you can buy a copy, maybe eBay.

robert213 wrote:Using InterVideo WinDVD2000 (that came bundled with my IBM system recovery CD's), I can play *.IFO and *.VOB by double-clicking on them in Windows Explorer... Using VideoLAN VLC media player, it just plays the video menu over and over again.

That sounds like a file association issue. You have to tell Windows to always open VOB and IFO files using VLC.

The only way that I've been able to get VLC media player to play videos from her machine's HD is to start VLC media player first, and then open the file folder.

I have a context menu, (select file/directory, then right-click) that includes "Play with VLC media player" that I use to select and play videos. FWIW I installed VLC as part of K-Lite Mega Codec Pack in order to get additional codecs and other features. That also includes Media Player Classic, another player that handles DVD files and directories.

Any other thoughts?

You might want to Google around to see if there's any free or low-cost software to edit VOBs so that your GF can create clips of just the material she wants. I don't know if such software exists.