My daughter tried to watch a dvd on her desk top recently, she has the latest version of windows media player, but it says she needs a dvd decoder (video decoder).
Is there one I can download to work in line with windows, apart from the microsoft website, where I have to pay!

are you sure she has the latest version of Media player as I thought that had the DVD decoder built in.

You could try an eval copy of PowerDVD and see if that fixes the problem.

thinking about it, new pc, but running windows xp on it, however she did say she downloaded the latest version of media player

The exact error message she is getting would be helpful. I can't find the correct specs for Media Player 11 but I'm 99% sure it does because I had a DVD playing in it when I built a new laptop for my dad a month back.......

Should be called Windows Mean Player.
Try downloading codecs from CCCP.

Xp comes with naff all in codec terms. If the WMP says no dice, then you need ideally a piece of software - I would recommend Power DVD 4 or later, but there are others that will work - check google for info.

I'm using a free DVD Codec with WMP: DScaler (http://www.dscaler.org/). Works a treat. :8

Many thks all, will check them out later when i escape from work!!