Page 1 of PC DVD Player Software recommendation?

Can anyone recommend any good freeware PC DVD player software?

Thanks,

Hodge.

As far as I know, there aren`t any free software players due to the licensing costs involved with Dolby Digital/DTS/CSS etc. You may get one bundled with new PCs, but otherwise it looks like you`ll have to pay.

Unless someone else reading this knows of a place!

Zoom Player is free. I haven`t tried it personally as I use Power DVD, but you can download it from download.com

Zoom isn`t a software DVD decoder though. You need to have a software decoder installed like WinDVD or PowerDVD for Zoom to work.

Zoom is a `front end` which uses the files already installed by WinDVD etc to playback DVDs. I`ve just used it. Here`s an extract from the Zoom readme file:

"First let me stress that Zoom Player is a DVD front-end and not a
DVD decoder software. It will not be able to play DVD content
without a 3rd party DVD decoder filter installed on the system.

These DirectShow filters are usually bundled with DVD playback
software in the form of ".AX" files.

For example, WinDVD comes with 3 DirectShow filters by the names of:
"iviaudio.ax" - WinDVD`s Audio Decoder filter.
"ivivideo.ax" - WinDVD`s Video Decoder filter.
"ivinav.ax" - WinDVD`s Navigator filter."

You can check out Zoom from: http://www.inmatrix.com/files/zoomplayer_download.html

While Zoom works for R2, it doesn`t like R1 or R4, even though the DVD-Rom is already switched to another region which PowerDVD plays.

Check out www.vcdhelp.com. Look at the sidebar and look for tools, somewhere in there it lists Software DVD players. Some of them are Freeware.

Or check out www.tucows.com.

However I have an 800Mhz P3 with DVD drive and you still get the odd stutter with Software decoding. Only good way is to get a hardware decoder card for the PC.
Spine

All that power and still stutter? I use a dual pentium 2-400, win2k and software decoding with PowerDVD is stutter free!

:-)

Just to let you know, I checked out Tucows (out of curiosity). http://www.tucows.com/mmedia/dvdutil95.html

I downloaded and tried FreeDVD, and I can see why it`s free. It can play R2 movies okay, but don`t expect to select any audio tracks other than the default. No multiangle feature and limited app functions, it also seems to have problems with the menus of the few discs I tried (r1, r2 and r4). It`s so fiddly when selecting a menu option that I screamed and swore at the screen, and anyone who knows me knows that I don`t normally swear! The playback wasn`t bad at all, stutter free in fact.

As Spinalize says, check out: http://www.vcdhelp.com/vcdtools.htm#players for a list of stuff which may help, there are some freeware players there, though I haven`t tried any.

Good luck!

:-)

This item was edited on Friday, 11th January 2002, 12:45

Cheers, I`ll check out the page today.

Thanks to you all for your help and input, much appreciated.

Hodge.

I have Windows XP and windows media player is by far the most simple to use player ive seen. IF you simply want to press play and no messin, then its perfect, Cant seem to find how to change the aspect ratio for widescreen films tho. In this case i use PowerDVD...works execllent if you need to change the size of the picture/digital zoom.

This item was edited on Tuesday, 15th January 2002, 12:26