All sound and no Video

I got a new laptop for my birthday with a DVD-Rom because I have a good collection and wrestling the T.V. away from my Mother is a bit of a pain. Anyway, before I got my hands on it, my brother made sure it worked, appearently we needed some kind of codec or decoder or something to make it work. Okay, went online Saturday, nada. Tried PowerDVD. When at full screen the audio and sound were choppy and skipped frequently. It lessened some at less than full screen, but I didn't want to ruin my disc. I tried installing the lastest addition of Interactual, but it didn't have what I needed. I tried to load an older version and it says I need a DVD Navigator. I tried the help site and it started in with a mumbo-jumbo I didn't understand. I can heard the DVD's played through Windows Media Player, but I can't see them. Please help, I don't want to complain too much, but I wanna watch Transformers!! Any help would be greatly appreciated. And as for specs on my computer..... Ya got me. I wish I could be of more help. Thank you in advance!!

 

If PowerDVD was choppy, you either don't have enough RAM (256mb is really a good idea- minimum), or you have too many things running in the background (like resource hungry apps- MacAfee and Norton are good examples), or both. Commercial DVD software doesn't need codecs for 'factory' DVD playback, so PowerDVD should be fine. Download, install, and run PCWizard (Link: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3846.html) and get the info about your hardware from it. Post your RAM, CPU, and maybe give us an idea of the software that runs when Windows starts up, and we can go from there. You can also try using a codec pack and 3rd party media player; Storm is good and has MediaPlayerClassic built in (Link: http://www.majorgeeks.com/Storm_Codec_d5491.html). Let us know your specs, and if Storm & MPC work.....

Oh.... Welcome to MajorGeeks! :major

BTW- Transformers is an AWESOME movie! It's actually better to watch it on a larger screen; unless you're running a 27" monitor on your PC, I'd really recommend watching it on a home theater system....

 

Thanks for the help, I'll download these and see how it goes. Thanks again!

 

*blushes* I just had to turn the monitor to 16-bit. Thanks for the info and downloads though!