How to fix Window Media Player "Cannot Play This DVD" error message

Posted on September 26, 2007 at 12:38 pm

Make sure to read other posts from the Video Codecs series!

How to fix Window Media Player "Cannot Play This DVD" error message
CodecInstaller - Find and download audio and video codecs to play movies

Isn’t it great how even in our modern computer age with Windows XP and Windows Vista, you can still receive an error like “windows media player cannot play this dvd because there is problem with digital copy protection” when you’re trying to watch a regular DVD from Blockbuster or Netflix on your computer! It’s really a pain in the butt that something like that doesn’t just “work” considering it’s VERY COMMON for people to watch DVDs on their computers!

Anyway, this happened to me last night and it took me about 20 minutes to fix the problem, so I thought I would write up how I ended up fixing the problem! Hopefully, you read this before thinking it’s some problem with Windows or with your DVD drive, etc as I have seen some people re-install Windows or get a new DVD drive because of this error!

Actually, the problem all comes down to something called Codecs. Codecs are small pieces of software that can decode the material on a DVD. Whenever a DVD is created, especially new one with copyright protection software installed on them, the content of the DVD is encoded using algorithms into a special format. This encoded data cannot be played on your computer in it’s normal format, so it has to be DECODED on your computer before it plays.

You may have hear of Divx, which is a codec that allows people to compress full-length DVDs onto a CD without losing much of it’s original image quality. Some software DVD players will auto-download the required codecs for you and hence you won’t have this problem, but for some reason Windows Media Players sucks at this and will pop up with the error message.

You can download all of the codecs for just about any type of video format by going to Free-Codecs.net and downloading the XP Codec Pack and the K-Lite Codec Pack. You’ll see them both listed under Codec Packs in the left hand menu.

You’ll also see one called Codec Pack All in 1, which may sound better, but it actually didn’t work for me! Not really sure why, but the once I installed the other two packs and restarted my computer, my DVD played just fine!

You might find some other solutions on Microsoft’s site, such as restarting your computer or taking the disk out and putting it back in, but those are obviously NOT going to work! I’m not sure why there own knowledge base article on this issue does not even mention codecs!

Hope it fixes someone’s problem! Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: codecs, window media player, cannot play dvd, wmp error, play dvds

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3 Responses to “How to fix Window Media Player "Cannot Play This DVD" error message”

Madhur Kapoor said on : September 27th, 2007 at 8:14 am

Cool Tip buddy .

Scott N. said on : May 21st, 2008 at 9:37 pm

THANK YOU SO MUCH! EVERY OTHER SITE WAS TELLING ME TO DO ALL THIS COMPLICATED SHIT LIKE BUYING THINGS! THANK YOU

How to fix Window Media Player “Cannot Play This… : Daily Vista News Says:

[...] ShareMonster.org wrote an interesting article today about Here’s a quick quote Copyright Feed Content - OnlineTechTips - Aseem Kishore 18254532AKMK Isn’t it great how even in our computer modern age with Windows XP and Windows Vista, you can still receive an error like “windows media player cannot play this dvd because … with Windows or with your DVD drive, etc as I have seen some people re-install Windows or get a new Posted in Computer Tips From A Computer Guy ( 196 links from 149 sites) [...]
September 26th, 2007 at 1:04 pm