Does uninstalling WinDVD mess with playback?

[thatcrazycommie]

I always use VLC to watch DVDs, and I was trying to clear up some space on my T60p's hard drive, so I thought, screw it, I'm getting rid of the bundled WinDVD program, since I never use it. When I did, it gave me a strange pop-up warning that uninstalling it might mess up DVD playback in other programs, and I thought "Nah, that doesn't make any sense, this program shouldn't be tied into my optical drive or video card" and went ahead and uninstalled it.

Now, I'm really not sure if I'm going insane or not, but it does seem like maybe the picture is kind of fuzzy when I watch DVDs in VLC. I'm hoping you guys can reassure me that this is just placebo, but the more movies I watch, the more I get a nagging feeling the picture isn't as sharp as it should be/used to be. Was the warning it gave me true? If so, is there some way to fix it?

[ryengineer]

Make sure DMA mode is enabled for the DVD player you're using:

Trouble Playing DVD's.

[thatcrazycommie]

It's set to DMA. I guess basically I'm just wondering what the heck that warning message it gave me was supposed to mean.

[ryengineer]

From your post, it seems you're not aware of what DVD Playback means.

Basics of DVD Playback

DVDs contain their video content in a highly-compressed format called MPEG-2. Compression is necessary because each second of video would require 31 MB of storage if uncompressed. At that rate, a DVD would only hold about two and a half minutes of video. Using industry-standard MPEG-2 compression, a DVD can hold a little over two hours of video. (These figures are all based on single-layer DVDs. The highest capacity DVDs—dual-layer, double-sided—hold four times as much.)

Decompressing MPEG-2 requires a lot of computing power. DVD players contain a chip specifically designed to decompress MPEG-2 data. However, modern PCs have enough computing power to decode MPEG-2 entirely by software. For a couple of years now, computers equipped with DVD drives have contained DVD decoder software capable of playing DVDs. These decoders were provided by the PC or DVD drive manufacturer. Until Windows XP, you also needed a DVD player application, but Windows Media Player for Windows XP now fully supports DVD playback, as long as a compatible DVD decoder is installed.