Once again: Can't play movies :(

My marvelous Black Lotus (ASUS N61Jq laptop) is incapable of playing DVDs nd BluRay disks! I know the DVDs are good, they play in my desktop PC and the Bluray movies play in the PS3. I know the drive itself is okay, since I can install and play games on Black Lotus.

I installed VLC and the full K-Lite codec pack, which is what I had on my XP desktop. However, whenever I try to play a DVD, VLC can't see the disk, and Windows Media Player tries to play the movie but fails. I have Windows 7 Home Premium, fully up to date. Ideas are welcome... I was very much looking forward to spending the next few hours admiring Ken Watanabe as the rebel leader in The Last Samurai.

 

Reading this, is it safe to say that the drive intermittently reads discs for you?

I've had very similar symptoms, and I've managed to resolve them by updating the firmware on the drive.

It's a stab, as this was a handful of years ago, and the DVD format war was still going on, and I wouldn't expect a modern drive to have this issue, but you never know...

 

I'm not sure about that. It reads game discs very consistently, and consistently refuses the other two formats it should be reading.

I'll look into firmware updates. Thanks!

 

I never actually tried playing BluRay disk on it before. I only looked at the specs on the ASUS website, and since it says "bluray" I assumed it can. Good point though... it might not have that capacity.

It should still play DVDs though... I will try to reinstall some drivers for it and see if that makes a difference.

 

GRRRRRRRRR!!!!! :guns

I want to watch Last Samurai!!! :crybaby

Ahem. Er. Um. Sorry about that. :-o

The move that refused to play was Remember the Titans. I will test a few more DVDs and report back.

 

Okay. I told The Guy I thought the DVD player on Black Lotus had issues and that I needed movies for testing, and he immediately lent me his movie collection for testing. After 20-something DVDs I stopped testing--they all worked. They all also auto-played, some let me choose between WMP and VLC. Several of them were dual-layer, or so they claimed, so I am going to blame yesterday's problems on the specific DVD I was trying to watch.

I did notice that whenever I told Lotus to play the DVDs using VLC there was massive failure, so clearly my VLC install is messed up. I am going to wipe it out and start over. Suggestions for similar movie players in Win7 are welcome. VLC was outstanding in XP, but if other applications work better in Win7, I'm all ears.

And now, since I found The Last Samurai in The Guy's collection of DVDs, I am going to go watch it. Thanks plodr!

 

It has Windows Media Player, and it was able to play all the DVDs I tried. I just don't like it very much, so I'm looking for an alternative. If I find one I'll let you know.