Cannot play DVD using Realplayer or WMP on Acer Aspire
 

Hi,
New Acer Aspire 9104 running XP has Arcade player installed. When playing some DVDs, the picture and audio is occasionally garbled. Have tried all suggested fixes (resolution, DMI, Radeon drivers, codecs etc) to no avail. Have never been able to play DVDs with Real or WMP, even after uninstalling Arcade. Nothing related on this forum using search. Any ideas?

See if you can get hold of WinDVD or PowerDVD these are 2 of the more popular, (and better) DVD playing software.

Do the disks play ok on other systems?

(hope the acer is ok as I am getting one delivered tomorrow)

I have an Acer Aspire 3610 and the DVD plays fine in Arcade.

Have you tried altering the region settings??

Will it play a music CD?

As I understand it realplayer and windows media player both require a third party codec to be installed to play DVDs which they would get if you had Power DVD etc. It might be that something else is using up a lot of resources so the DVD software falls short.

You could try VideoLAN Player it has its own codec for DVDs is free and seems to work fine for me.
http://www.videolan.org/

I actually had the hardware accelerator turned down so that I could display MPEGs in Powerpoint through a projector while monitoring on the laptop screen. I turned up the accelerator all OK but cannot display on laptop and projector together - is there anyway around this or is it always a compromise?
Thank you all for replies - spanners, ACER is OK but I did not have any of these problems with my old Acer Aspire 1400. BTW, I will PM you about some ALAE business.

Had the same problem for a while but now use Nero which seems to cover everything. The other thing i did was get K-lite codec pack which is free
cheers