DVD playback question

[conrad]

Hi everyone, please forgive me if this is not the right forum for this question...

I have a DVD from India. It purports to be "NTSC - All Regions" however I have only gotten it to play on a Mac. When it was on the Mac, it did show that the disc was set for regions 1-8, however I have tried it on several different DVD players, including a new, high-end one & it will not play. Sometimes it gives an error message to the effect of "This disc cannot be played." Someone's brand-new PC gave a message that a DVD decoder was needed.

Another wrinkle is that it is a dual-layer disc, however I tested other dual-layer discs on the same players I tested this Indian disc on & they played fine, so I don't think that is the issue.

Thanks in advance if anyone can shed some light on this issue or can direct me to a more suitable forum!

[saltman]

What program are you using to play it with on your PC? Windows media player can not play DVDs out of the box because it lacks an mpeg2 decoder. Try VLC, it's free.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

you could also drop one of the vobs into the container area in gspot and get better information about what the disc really is.

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/GSpot.htm



and BTW this is the correct forum.

[conrad]

Thanks for the reply saltman!

I downloaded Gspot & dropped in a .vob as you suggested... I admit I'm really not sure what to make of it but I attached a screenshot of it.

The thing is about this DVD is that belongs to the library I work at - so it would be great if I could figure out how to get it to play on a player for patrons who borrow it. I guess if it doesn't play then it doesn't play, but maybe if I knew why I could try to get another version of it or something like that.

Thanks again saltman!

edit: forgot to add that I had one of the guys in the media center try to make a definite region 1 copy - this worked for a German DVD that was definitely region 2 - but that copy won't play either... I'm stumped!

http://i251.photobucket.com/albums/gg300/the_rizzle69/ddlj.jpg

[Thulani]

Gspot sais that you don't have the mpeg2 codec installed.
VideoLan (http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Video-Players/VideoLAN-Client.shtml), MediaPlayer Classic (http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Video-Players/Media-Player-Classic-for-Win2kXP.shtml), KmPlayer (http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Video-Players/KMPlayer.shtml) can play the DVD without installing the codec.

[conrad]

Yeah, I saw that, but what's odd about that is the DVD played on that PC! That's what's killing me about this disc, it plays on computers (except the brand new one I mentioned & even then it prompted to download a codec so I presume it would play on there after that).

But it just won't play on a component DVD player which is what I'd like! Thanks for your input kill_them_all