David reads books

Watching DVD movies on a PC

After I bought my computer I thought I would be able to watch DVD movies without any problems. I put a movie in the DVD drive and selected "play with Windows Media Player", but then found I lacked some of the necessary software.

I was lead to this page and this page on Microsoft's website. It seemed like I would have to pay US$15 or thereabouts to download a DVD decoder plug-in for Windows Media Player.

A little more searching via Google lead me to discover the VideoLan site where I was able to download the VLC media player for free. After installing the program I put a DVD movie in the DVD drive and I was able to watch it without any hassles.

It really is amazing that there is so much free software out there that is often just as good as the stuff you pay big dollars for. With the exception of Windows XP, all the software installed on my computer was free. And it is totally legal!!!!

A few of the excellent programs I can recommend are Irfanview for editing photos and OpenOffice.org for word processing. Mozilla's Firefox internet browser shows up Microsoft's Internet Explorer as a hopelessly inferior product.

Labels: tech

posted by David @ 8:38 AM