Vista Business and windows media player

[dominiccoombe]

Its seems that vista business is not designed or meant to work with winodws media player for watching movies.

Can someone please help me either fix it or tell me a good alternative for watching movies on.

Thanks.

dominif

[mevensen]

Could you be a little more specific as to what is, or is not happening?
What is the source of the movie you are trying to play (e.g. DVD, D2D download, home movie, etc.)?
Are there any error messages, etc. being generated?
Vista Business doesn't have Media Center, but Media Player should work with the proper Codec, although I haven't played with it enough to know what it can/can't handle right out of the box.

[glc]

If it's like XP, you need to install DVD player software such as PowerDVD to install the proper codecs.

[dominiccoombe]

Basically I am using the installed WMP 11 that comes with Vista.

If I put a DVD Movie in and ask it to play WMP comes back and says

Dvd codecs missing cannot play

[glc]

What I said. ^^^^^

[mevensen]

Basically I am using the installed WMP 11 that comes with Vista.

If I put a DVD Movie in and ask it to play WMP comes back and says

Dvd codecs missing cannot play

IN XP, WMP directs you to a number of options for DVD playback, I believe they cost about $20 USD on average.

Look here

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/plugins.aspx#DVDDecoder

[dominiccoombe]

but most of these are not certified for windows vista

[glc]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/dvdcodecs.aspx

DVD Playback Options for Windows
If you are running Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Business, or Windows XP, you must install a compatible MPEG-2 decoder (also known as a DVD decoder) before continuing with the following activities.
Playing a DVD
Playing a recorded TV show
Playing video files that were encoded with the MPEG-2 codec (.mpeg, .mpg, and some .avi files)


For Windows Vista
DVD playback capabilities are available in Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista and will be available for purchase for other editions when the final version of Windows Vista is available.

After further research, you are going to have to buy the Nvidia decoder. It's Vista-compatible.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/dvd_decoder.html

[Disgrace]

I can't play many videos on WMP either. I use VLC Media Player. Personally, I think it's brilliant... all sorts of formats work on that. It's downloadable/free/small and non adware etc etc. I hope i'm keeping within forum rules here by suggesting free alternatives... highly recommend but not sure about Vista compat.

[glc]

VLC works in Vista in OpenGL mode.