Thread: Playing a DVD on my laptop?

Soo, I have a Dell Vostro 1000 and I use windows media to play things. I tried to put in the dvd but when it tried to play it, an error box popped up saying "a compatible DVD decoder is not installed" Soo, where do I get this software and can I get it for free?

Decoders are the things that sort of interpret the particular format of a video file.

There are many different decoders and you need the right one to watch the particular DVD your trying to play, are you sure it doesn't give you the name of the decoder that it needs?

If your not sure, Media Player Classic comes with lots of codecs, so you can install that and it should work. Before you install Media Player Classic, you need to know if your computer is 32 bit or 64 bit, so you install the right version. To find this out go to start (or were start normally is) put your mouse over "my computer" (or just "computer") right click and click on properties. Beside "system type" it will tell you 32 or 64 bit.

To download Media Player Classic for 32 bit go here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpc-hc/files/MPC%20HomeCinema%20-%20Win32/MPC-HC%20v1.4.2499.0_32%20bits/MPC-HomeCinema.1.4.2499.0.x86.exe/download

To download Media Player Classic for 64 bit go here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpc-hc/files/MPC%20HomeCinema%20-%20x64/MPC-HC%20v1.4.2499.0_64%20bits/MPC-HomeCinema.1.4.2499.0.x64.exe/download

Install that and let us know if it works!
By the way it's free.