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ThinkPad 770ED DVD Problem

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LyonAdmiral1981
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Joined: Fri Mar 16, 2018 10:01 pm
Location: Plattsburgh, New York

ThinkPad 770ED DVD Problem

#1 Post by LyonAdmiral1981 » Wed Jul 25, 2018 7:44 pm

I have a 770ED with the DVD and MPEG decoder card. I did a factory restore on it and did make sure to use the DVD region code disc 1 to set the region but whenever I put in a movie DVD, the drive will read the data but the movie player app with is the IBM branded SoftDVD (which says Hardware Accelerated) says that there is no disc in the drive. Do I need an update or are the new DVD's too new for this software?

pkiff
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Re: ThinkPad 770ED DVD Problem

#2 Post by pkiff » Sat Jul 28, 2018 11:57 am

I doubt it's an issue with the DVDs. I personally never managed to get SoftDVD to work on my 770ED or 770Z machines, but I didn't usually start with a factory restore.

I guess you're using Windows 98 if you did a factory restore? Or is it Windows 2000? I think that SoftDVD is designed to work with Windows 98 only. I always used DVDExpress on my 770 machines, which I think is supposed to be better than SoftDVD and is also compatible with the 770 series DEVA MPEG card. DVDExpress works with Windows 2000 and XP, but I forget if you can run DVDExpress under Windows 98.

There are quirks between different types of DVD drives, and the way that region encoding worked in the hardware changed over time. So it is possible that SoftDVD is not compatible with your drive, unless you have an original DVD drive as well. But that isn't much help for you, I know.

Did you try installing the MPEG features driver (I know you shouldn't have to do this after a factory install, but it's worth trying if you've run out of options and haven't already). It might somehow make your DVD drive "active" and enabled with respect to region code stuff - which I suspect is the root of the issue.

If you give up on SoftDVD and want to try DVDExpress, I can probably find a link to an ISO somewhere if there isn't one easily available on the web.
X1E Gen 4 · X1T 3rd Gen · W520 · Legacy: P52, T60p, X61T, 600X, 770Z
Nostalgic for: 600X PIII 850MHz in a SelectaDock III with 64MB Voodoo 5 5500 and Sound Blaster Audigy 5.1.

LyonAdmiral1981
Posts: 11
Joined: Fri Mar 16, 2018 10:01 pm
Location: Plattsburgh, New York

Re: ThinkPad 770ED DVD Problem

#3 Post by LyonAdmiral1981 » Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:00 pm

I did figure it out what it was...The factory preload splits the drive into two or more partitions by default. After the preload I use Partition Magic to repartition into one partition that takes up the entire drive. Now there are no registry settings for the DVD software that tell it what drive to use but once I went into the device manager and changed the drive back to the preload designated letter it worked. :)

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