Least ridiculous-looking DVD software?

[Edward Mendelson]

It's time to install a DVD player on some Windows XP (and 98) machines, all with 256MB or more of memory.

Many players that I've seen have silly-looking control panels that seem to have been designed by Salvador Dali. Is there anything that works well and has a simple, sensible-looking interface?

Thanks in advance for any information on this....

[hausman]

Is this simple enough? http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

P.S. Is the price low enough? Does it support enough OSs, audio/video formats, etc?

[gosha16]

im a big fan of powerdvd, plus you can do skins to change the look if you dont like it

[JHEM]

I'll second the vote for PowerDVD Ed. Works with everything and you can make the control interface as simple as you want.

It's pretty much all I use.

Regards,

James

[Edward Mendelson]

Thanks for all replies, and I'll try both programs. Quick question if you have the patience for it:

I know that the player will warn me if I use a DVD coded for outside my region (region 1), but does the player give any indication whether or not a disk is for my own region or whether it's "region 0" (world-wide)? This is soemthing I need to know when posting information about some disks on line, and it would be nice to be able to find the information easily.

(If there's a utility that displays the region coding of a disk, I'd also be glad to hear about it.)

Thanks again!

[sswany]

This is a neat one I ran across a long time ago (never used it though):

http://www.theatertek.com/

[sktn77a]

Or you can install the "Dali"DVD player but just use Media player 9 - it will use the DVD decoder from the other player but with it's own interface/skin.

[Edward Mendelson]

To answer my own question, PowerDVD tells you the region settings of the current disk in its Configuration dialog.

Thanks again to all!