A reader writes with a question about playing DVDs in Windows 10.
“My new Windows 10 laptop (Toshiba Satellite C55-B5382) came equipped with PowerDVD 12 rather than any of the old familiar movie players. Partway through most movies (not all, but way over half that I’ve tried to watch) the player announces that it has encountered something unreadable and will cease playback. Once the player has made that determination there’s no restarting the DVD; the app blithely claims that there’s no disc in the drive. Apparently PowerDVD stores these failures in memory and won’t even try to play a movie that it has previously judged problematic. All these DVDs play fine in an older computer. Do I need to replace PowerDVD with something more suitable for typical movies?”
Microsoft does make a DVD player that isn’t included with Windows 10 but is for sale at its app store.
The Microsoft DVD Player costs $14.99, and it works with commercial and homemade discs.
Microsoft is making the DVD Player a free download if you upgrade from Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate as well as Windows 8/8.1 with Media Center.
If you’d like to explore a cheaper option, VLC for Windows from VideoLAN is a great product I’ve been using for years.
VLC is free and open source and can be downloaded from www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html.
I can’t say enough nice things about VLC. It’s played darn near everything I’ve thrown at it for years, and it just keeps getting better.
If you visit videolan.org you’ll find versions there for Macintosh as well. I also have a copy of VLC on my iPhone and iPad. There are versions for iOS and Android.
Playing back Blu-ray discs is a different animal.
Most computers that ship with a Blu-ray drive will come bundled with a Blu-ray player; otherwise you’ll have to buy your own Blu-ray playback app.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Jim Rossman writes for The Dallas Morning News. He may be reached at jrossman@dallasnews.com.
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