How to associate DVD discs with a player, manually.

[Paul Victorey]

Well, not sure how much use people have for this, but just in case:

I had a problem -- I installed DVD player "A" and hated it. I installed DVD player "B" and it worked great, and would auto-launch DVDs. Then I uninstalled player "A" and all of a sudden, my DVDs were associated with a program that doesn't even exist.

I originally thought I could associate DVDs just like audio CDs -- for audio CDs you can open the "file types" dialog, scroll to file with extension "N/A" and type "Audio CD", and make changes. Alas, there is no equivalent for DVDs.

I made this work by registry editing (make appropriate backups of registry if you try this). On systems with 2 registry editors (NT, 2K, XP), use regedit (not regedt32) as regedit always shows default values for keys; regedt32 only shows defaults if they're not empty.

1. Open to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\DVD\shell and look at the default value (it most likely will have the data "play").

2. Letting "xxxx" be the default value you found in step 1, open the key
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\DVD\shell\xxxx\command
so, if the default action from step 1 was "play", this would be:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\DVD\shell\play\command

3. Change the default value of this key to the full path and filename of the executable to launch.

Now, DVDs should auto-launch with this program. You also must have auto-insert notification enabled with the drive for ANY autoplaying to work.

This is known to work under Win2000, and I'm assuming it most likely works under any Win32 operating system. But that is just an educated guess, so take it with a grain of salt.