Chapter 15. Fix and Tweak Graphics and Video

What You’ll Learn

In this chapter, I’ll show you:

• How to adjust color depth

• Which version of Vista does not come with the Aero interface

• How to upgrade your video driver

• How to adjust hardware acceleration

• How to tweak the interface for better performance

• How to make screen text bigger

• How to fix a problematic video driver

• How to install or fix a video codec

• How to fix a DVD playback problem

Fix Your Pixels: Dealing with Display Issues

One of Vista’s great strengths is its new look and feel. On the surface, Vista looks somewhat familiar, like XP that’s been to the beauty salon. After you start using the new operating system, however, it becomes apparent that under the skin, Vista’s interface—called Aero—is very different and definitely improved.

Aero (or “Aero glass,” as some geeks called it) is more than just lipstick on a pork rind. It offers a series of enhancements that make Vista both fun and easy to use (see Figure 15.1).

Figure 15.1. Oh look! The windows are see-through in Vista’s Aero interface.

You’ll notice immediately that Aero offers some key enhancements:

• Windows and the Start menu have glasslike edges.

• Icons are no longer static. Now they are thumbnails of the files they contain.

• When you minimize a window to the taskbar, you can preview what’s in it by rolling your mouse over it. As you do, a window with live content (including video that plays) appears in the preview.

• The new Flip 3D interface (activated by holding down the Windows key + Tab) allows you to flip through open windows in 3D (see Figure 15.2).

Figure 15.2. The Flip 3D interface is a fun way of browsing through open windows.

• Windows that allow you to explore files and folders (traditionally called Windows Explorer) are redesigned to better find content. Search bars perch at the top corner of all system windows. And the file browser functionality is designed differently.

That said, display issues, especially with Aero, can drive you to bang your head against the wall. So what follows is a series of complaints you may have with graphics and your display in Vista, and my simple (and sometimes quick) solutions that will help you fix them with confidence.

Aero? What Aero?

If your computer doesn’t look that different from XP and you don’t see any fancy new rounded windows, content-previewing icons, or glasslike edges, Aero may not be running on your system.

This could be the byproduct of several conditions. So let’s examine them.

Which Version of Vista?

First, let me ask you, which version of Vista are you running? If your computer runs Vista Home Basic, a version of the new operating system designed for older, pokier computer hardware, then—surprise!—that budget version of Vista does not come with the Aero interface.

To see which version of Vista you are running, do the following:

1. Click the Windows button and type System in the search bar.

2. Click System when it appears in the Start menu.

3. When the System window appears, look at the top center of the window under Windows Edition to discover which edition of Vista you are running (see Figure 15.3).

Figure 15.3. The System window shows you which version of Vista you are running.

To get Aero working, you’ll have to ensure that your computer has enough horsepower and graphics capability to run the new flashy features. If so, you’ll need to buy an upgrade from Microsoft to a better version of Vista. I’d recommend Home Premium, or if you are feeling flush with cash because your patent for cold fusion came through, Vista Ultimate.

You can either use the Vista disc you already have, or if one didn’t come with your system, Microsoft can ship you a disc called Windows AnyTime Upgrade. It will install the upgrade and new license when you run it.

For more info, go to http://tinyurl.com/33nk6h and http://tinyurl.com/vtppq.

Did Someone Turn Off Aero?

It could also be that your roommate/spouse/babysitter turned off Aero.

Turn it on again by right-clicking on an empty space on the desktop; then choose Personalize and click Window Color and Appearance, Open Classic Appearance and Properties. Choose Windows Aero from the Color scheme pull-down and click OK (see Figure 15.4).

Figure 15.4. Reset the Windows color scheme to Windows Aero.

You Are Deluded

It could also be that this is 1995. You’re a Microsoft Bob (see Figure 15.5) programmer who has gone insane. And you’re in your padded cell dreaming lucidly about what may be to come. But this book and Vista are not real. It’s all just an illusion conjured up by me, the voice inside your head. Ask the guard for some Cheerios and then put them down your pants.

Figure 15.5. It might seem like a delusion, but Microsoft Bob was a very real Microsoft interface, circa 1995.

My Colors Are Ugly and Chunky

So one day, you turn on your computer to discover that the colors have suddenly gone blocky, ugly, or grainy. Pictures you work with on your computer have gone all nasty (see Figure 15.6), and that photo of your beauty queen niece looks like she’s been exposed to a Star Trek skin disease.

Figure 15.6. Has your display gone ugly? You should reset your color depth.

When your computer gets a case of the uglies, it can also prevent you from using your system effectively, especially if you’re working with photographs.

So what’s causing it? Mice. Yep, mice are eating at your video cables. OK, maybe not.

Actually, there are a few reasons why you might have problems with the quality of your display. One of the most common—and the easiest to fix—is related to something called color depth. On a computer’s graphics card, each color is represented by a numerical code that correlates to shades of red, green, and blue (RGB). The more shades of each of these colors, the more color variants the graphics card is capable of displaying.

At lower color depths, fewer colors can be displayed on the screen, which means the subtler shades that appear in photographs and in your desktop icons have to be adjusted to the nearest shade that can be displayed in the color palette that your video card is set to display.

The end result is that subtle gradients of yellow—for example, in that photograph of your cheese collection—get assigned a yellow from the limited palette, so your Gouda portrait makes it look like processed cheese slices. When this happens, it becomes harder to recognize what’s on the screen (see Figure 15.7).

Figure 15.7. This is actually a photograph of some really nice flowers, but with the color depth set to 8-bit (and because we printed it in grayscale), it is barely recognizable.

How to Fix Color Depth

Here’s how to reset your color depth:

1. Right-click anywhere on an empty part of the Windows desktop and choose Personalize (see Figure 15.8).

Figure 15.8. Right-click on the desktop and click Personalize to adjust your display settings.

2. When the Personalization dialog box pops up, scroll down to the bottom and click on Display Settings.

3. In Display Settings, look for the Colors option down at the bottom-right side of the dialog box. Underneath the Colors heading is a drop-down menu. The color depth of your system is listed in it as a number of bits (see Figure 15.9).

Figure 15.9. Change the color depth of your system.

4. Ideally, set this to 32-bit, if it’s an option. If your graphics card doesn’t support 32-bit as an option, choose 24-bit.

5. To change the color depth, click the drop-down menu and choose a higher value. Then click Apply.

6. Your computer will make an adjustment to the color depth, and the picture may flicker or go blank briefly. When it resets, it should be much clearer, and you’ll be asked if you want to keep the settings.

7. If so, click Yes. If not, click No, and the system will revert to the previous settings.

If none of this works, or you only have 8-bit or 16-bit options for color depth, and you are unable to change your graphics using the steps detailed previously, you will have to update your graphics driver to get more color depth.

To learn how to update your graphics driver, see “My Graphics Driver Needs an Update!” later in this chapter.

There’s No Room on My Screen!

If you’re keen to read this section, chances are you know what an elephant trainer feels like in a New York bachelor apartment. Your computer windows loom large on your screen and may not fit, just like a pachyderm fills up a living room.

Programs running on computers set to a low resolution fill the screen to the point where they may be cut off or hard to use.

Perhaps you figured this was normal, or perhaps you are OK with the way it looks. That said, one single setting adjustment can turn your tiny New York bachelor desktop into a spacious Donald Trump penthouse, without the hairpiece.

So let’s adjust the screen resolution. Even if you are happy with the screen resolution, follow along anyway—you might be surprised what your computer looks like when we’re done.

If you’re using an LCD display (see Figure 15.10), it’s especially important to make sure you’ve matched the display resolution of your desktop to the native resolution of the LCD monitor. (More on that in the next section.)

Figure 15.10. You need to match your LCD display’s native resolution to Windows Vista’s resolution setting. (Picture courtesy of ViewSonic.)

Here’s how to adjust your display’s resolution:

1. Right-click any unused portion of your empty desktop and choose Personalize.

2. In the Personalization dialog, scroll to the bottom and click Display Settings.

3. In Display Settings, look down the left-hand side for the Resolution heading.

4. To change your system’s resolution, simply click and hold on the slider (see Figure 15.11) and move it to the right (or left if you want a lower resolution). Then click Apply.

Figure 15.11. Adjust the slider to change the display resolution.

The system will adjust the resolution, and a dialog box will ask if you want to use the new setting. If you like the new look, click Yes, or click No to revert to the old settings.

My LCD Is Blurry

If you’re using an LCD flat panel monitor and your picture looks blurry, put your glasses on. Still blurry? OK, you might be trying to run the monitor in the wrong resolution.

Each LCD flat panel monitor has something called a “native” resolution, which represents the hard-wired number of horizontal and vertical pixels the LCD can display and has nothing to do with laws passed by indigenous people.

Think of an LCD as if it were an egg carton. The “native resolution” of an egg carton is 2×6 eggs. If you put 12 eggs in the carton, all is well. If you try to fit 14 eggs in the carton, it can get messy or the cover won’t close. If you put 10 eggs in a 12-slot carton, there are empty slots, and stretching 10 eggs to fill 12 holes is not a good idea unless you’re an omelet fan.

So, you want to match the number of pixels output from a computer to an LCD display native resolution—that is, the number of pixels the display was optimally designed for.

If you choose a different resolution, Vista may try to stretch or compress the picture over the actual number of pixels available on your LCD screen. And this can look awful. Either the picture won’t be crisp, or it may center a smaller resolution in the middle of the display surrounded by a black border.

...And My Desktop Is Bigger Than the Screen

In some cases, if you choose a resolution that is too large for the LCD panel, the desktop will scroll around as you move your mouse. It’s sort of like peering at the Mona Lisa through a camera when you are too close. You have to move the camera around to see the whole smiling image.

The Fix: Adjust the Resolution

To fix either of these conditions, simply match the display resolution to the LCD panel’s native resolution. To find out what that is, check the monitor’s specifications, either in the back of its manual or on the manufacturer’s website (see Figure 15.12).

Figure 15.12. ViewSonic lists the native resolution of its 20.1-inch VX2025wm LCD monitor on its website as 1680×1050 pixels.

Text on My Screen Is Too Small!

To get acres of usable desktop, you’ll need to set your system to the highest resolution possible. However, if you do, you’ll find that the icons, text, windows, and menus shrink proportionally to the increase in resolution. In a high-resolution setting, text under icons and on menus can be tiny and hard to read.

You either have to get your binoculars out or sit with your nose up against the monitor.

Luckily, this can be fixed. Here’s how to increase the Windows font size, so text is bigger and easier to read at high resolutions:

1. Right-click on your desktop and choose Personalize.

2. On the left-hand sidebar, click Adjust Font Size (DPI).

3. You’ll see a User Account Control warning. Click Continue.

4. By default, the scale for Windows text is set to 96 dpi (dots per inch). To make fonts bigger, select 120 dpi (see Figure 15.13).

Figure 15.13. Make your onscreen text bigger by adjusting the font DPI in the DPI Scaling window.

5. Click Apply; then click OK to select your new setting and restart Windows to update your system with the new settings.

You also have the option to use a custom DPI setting:

1. Click the Custom DPI button in the bottom-right corner of the DPI scaling applet box. A dialog box will open to display a ruler and a line of text. To adjust the text size to suit your taste, click and hold on the ruler and move your mouse left or right to scale or shrink the text. The sample text will reflect the size you’ve chosen (see Figure 15.14).

Figure 15.14. You can also customize the size of your Windows text.

2. Click OK, and it will add and select the new custom size into your choices on the main DPI Settings dialog.

3. Click OK to restart Vista to use the new settings.

My Screen Is Sluggish

If your graphics look okay, but the screen is slow to draw or windows animate in a jerky manner or in slow motion, here are a few things you can try to give the display a bit more zip.

Turn Off Transitions and Animations

You might want to turn off some or all of the fancy new Vista transitions. Fancy animations and effects require graphics resources that could be better used for more basic display tasks.

These include animate, fade, and shadow options. See Chapter 4 for more information on customizing these advanced graphics settings to increase not only your display performance, but also general system performance.

Lower the Bit Depth or Resolution

If you have an older graphics card with minimal video RAM, try lowering the screen resolution to a less-demanding setting, perhaps 1024×768 or 800×600. Or lower the color depth from 32-bits down to 24-bits. Both of these fixes will free up graphics resources and give your system a performance boost.

Adjust Hardware Acceleration

You could also take some of the load off your video card by adjusting hardware acceleration. When you do this, you can incrementally take graphics work away from your video card using a special advanced setting in Vista.

Here’s how:

1. Right-click on the desktop and choose Personalize.

2. Scroll down and click Display Settings.

3. Click the Advanced Settings button in the bottom-right corner of the Display Settings dialog.

4. Choose the Troubleshoot tab.

5. Click the Change Settings button.

6. Click Continue when the User Access Control warning pops up.

7. Move the Hardware Acceleration slider to the left notch by notch to disable various graphics tasks that are performed by your video card. A caption underneath the slider explains what’s being disabled as you shift the slider (see Figure 15.15).

Figure 15.15. Adjust the hardware acceleration slider until your video quirks disappear.

8. Reduce the acceleration a notch at a time until your video problems go away.

My Graphics Driver Needs an Update!

If you’ve tried all of the tweaks in this chapter and your display is still not working to your satisfaction, you may have to update your graphics card driver.

A driver, of course, is a piece of software that helps Vista communicate with a peripheral or system component. It is usually issued by the device manufacturer. Vista comes with a ton of its own built-in drivers that support all kinds of video cards.

However, there may not be a full-on Vista-ready driver available for your particular video card, or the Windows driver included on the disk may be buggy or sloppy in its engineering. So, one way to graphics card bliss is to find a better driver if one is available.

Easy Video Driver Update

You can often update your graphics drivers to the newest version by using the Windows Update feature:

1. Click the Windows button and type Windows Update; then click it when it appears in the Start menu.

2. Click Check for Updates on the left side of the Windows Update window.

3. Vista will phone home to Microsoft across the Internet and fetch any new fixes, patches, updates, or drivers. Vista then installs the ones it deems important to make available optional updates to you in the main window.

4. You may not want to install all updates either because you like to be selective about which updates to install, because of time constraints, or because it’s raining, and that’s as good a reason as any.

If so, I can be accommodating to your whims. So, next up, I’ll show you how to check for a driver update just for your graphics card.

Driver Update That’s a Bit More Difficult

To look for a specific update for your video card, follow these steps:

1. Right-click an empty spot on your desktop and choose Personalize.

2. Zip down to Display Settings and click it; then click the Advanced Settings button.

3. In the Adapter tab, look for information about the graphics driver Windows Vista is currently using.

4. To change or update your driver, click on the Properties button, and when User Account Control pops up, click Continue.

5. Click on the Driver tab and then click on the Update Driver button (see Figure 15.16).

Figure 15.16. Click the Update Driver button to attempt to update your graphics card’s driver.

6. In the dialog box that pops open, click the option that says Search Automatically for Updated Driver Software.

7. If Windows finds something better, it’ll ask whether you want to download and install it. Or, it will tell you that you already have the best one (see Figure 15.17).

Figure 15.17. If no new drivers are found, Vista will report that you already have the best one, not that that’s useful.

8. If a new driver is available, Vista will offer to download and install it. Go ahead and let it and then reboot when it does to see whether the new driver fixes your video issues.

Installing Video Drivers from the Manufacturer’s Website

If Vista can’t find a new video driver to download, it doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. It simply means Microsoft hasn’t yet included it in its online update library.

In fact, it could very well exist, but just hasn’t been submitted by the video card maker to Microsoft. So, it’s worth visiting the video card manufacturer’s website and browsing through its downloadable drivers to see whether a Vista-specific WDDM driver is available directly from the manufacturer. (See the “WDDM Demystified” sidebar for more info on what the heck WDDM is.)

If your video card is made by one of the big companies such as ATI or NVidia, this technique is worth a shot. It’s also worth checking with the manufacturer of your computer. Companies such as Dell, Lenovo, and many of the other big brand computer manufacturers offer downloadable drivers in the support areas of their websites.

If you find a more recent video card driver, be sure to download it and either extract it to a folder on your computer (that you can find later) or run the driver’s self-install package if it comes as an executable file (such as driver_update.exe).

In the event that you extract the driver to a folder, in the previous routine, instead of choosing Search Automatically for Updated Driver Software, select Browse My Computer for Driver Software (see Figure 15.18) and then click Browse to point to the folder where you’ve put the driver INF files that you downloaded and extracted.

Figure 15.18. If you downloaded a video driver manually, extract it to a folder and click Browse My Computer to show Vista where it is.

My Screen Won’t Display Anything!

Sometimes fate takes a wrong turn, and like a greedy dog near a fumbled pizza, things can go horribly wrong. You wake up one day, and your computer will boot up, but a video driver has gone wonky and the Vista desktop won’t come up. Unlike the pizza situation, you can’t blame the pepperoni gobbling hound on this problem. Blame the driver instead!

Often new drivers or improperly installed or incorrect drivers can cause Vista to choke. So here’s how to fix it:

1. Start up your system in Safe mode by rebooting and then make like a woodpecker and repeatedly tap the F8 key as the system boots (before you see the Windows logo).

2. You’ll get a menu that lists various options for booting. Choose Safe mode (see Figure 15.19).

Figure 15.19. Make like a woodpecker, and tap F8 repeatedly at bootup to get to the Safe Mode option.

3. This will boot you into a troubleshooting mode for Windows Vista that removes a lot of the fancy overhead (see Figure 15.20), including incorrect graphics drivers that may be interfering with your system’s capability to display stuff on your screen.

Figure 15.20. This is what Windows Vista looks like running in Safe mode and using basic display settings.

Tweaking Settings Bungled Your Video

If your display stopped working properly, following a change to the resolution, color depth, or refresh rate on your monitor, simply use the steps detailed in the previous sections to revert your changes back to their previous settings.

When the video settings are tweaked to something that you think will work, reboot the system to allow the settings to take hold and try to get back into the desktop. Once there, you can further experiment with them to optimal settings that work for your system.

New Video Driver Wreaking Havoc

If your display crapped out following a driver update, you’ll want to roll back your driver to the previous version and either try a different driver, if available, or stick with the old one and wait for Microsoft or your video card manufacturer to issue a new driver. I explain how to roll back a driver in Chapter 4.

My Video Won’t Play!

The bane of the computer user’s existence (or at least this computer user’s existence) has long been downloading and playing movie files or playing DVDs on a PC. I produce video as part of my living, hosting the Internet TV show Lab Rats (www.labrats.tv), so I am sensitive to video files that don’t play.

My co-host, Sean Carruthers, and I do our utmost to make it simple for people to consume our show, but we’ve discovered that it’s hard work. There are a myriad of formats and video players out there, and our viewers sometimes have to work really hard to get their machines up to spec so they can see specific video formats.

We encourage them to use our QuickTime format because video production starts on the Mac and outputs usually to MOV files. However, for simplicity, we also produce the iPod format M4V, as well as DIVX and WMV formats.

Getting video files to work on a Windows platform can be painful at times. I’d rather sit on a hedgehog than tweak a machine to play video some days.

If your computer is not set up to play back a specific format, you’re confronted with an annoying message that says there’s a missing codec or the file can’t be played by whatever player you are using to play it. Or you may encounter a situation where it’ll play the video part of the file, but not the audio, or play the audio, but not the video (see Figure 15.21).

Figure 15.21. Windows Media Player plays the audio portion of a file but not the video. Time for a better DIVX codec!

Vista improves on XP in this arena, but it’s still not trouble-free.

So, let’s look at what you can do to fix video file playback problems on Vista in whichever way they manifest.

To start, you should know that there are dozens of video file formats, just like there are many types of word processor documents. (There are also many types of cheese, though that has no relevance here.) And each one of them needs two key items in place on a PC to play them:

• A video player that plays video file you want to view

• An installed codec used by the player to decode the video

A codec is short for COder/DECoder (or Compressor/DECompressor). It is the software thingie that translates video and audio packed inside a multimedia file. Think of a multimedia file as a piece of luggage. Inside is video that can be played. But like clothes in a suitcase, it first has to be unpacked, unfolded, and ironed before it can be worn. That’s a codec’s job.

Codecs are also used to “pack” video content into a file. And only that specific codec can be used to unpack the file for playback. Windows Vista includes Windows Media Player (WMP) 11, which is the program that can play back Microsoft video and audio files and a few other non-Microsoft file formats. Let’s look more closely at it.

Windows Media Player 11 Troubleshooting

Windows Media Player 11 (see Figure 15.22) is the multimedia player that comes with all versions of Windows Vista.

Figure 15.22. Windows Media Player 11 for Vista playing an episode of Lab Rats downloaded from www.labrats.tv. (Editor’s Note: your friendly neighborhood author is the chap on the left.)

It will play a variety of Microsoft video formats, primarily WMV (Windows Media Video).

If a WMV file refuses to play, usually there is a problem with the file itself and not Windows Media Player. If you can confirm that the file will play on another computer with WMP 11, then of course, there may be something wrong with the player on your computer.

There could be a corrupt codec or the player itself may be damaged, though this is rare. In a case like this, you might want to check whether there is an update or fix for WMP 11. To do that:

1. Start Windows Media Player.

2. Enable the classic menus by clicking an empty spot on the black bar across the top of the player, and then choose View, Classic Menus.

3. Click the Help menu at the top of the player. And click Check for Updates (see Figure 15.23).

Figure 15.23. Check for a Windows Media Player update inside WMP 11.

4. If an update is available, it will be presented to you for download and installation. So go ahead.

5. Then restart Windows Media Player and see whether that fixes the problem.

If Windows Media Player WiMP’s Out

If Windows Media Player won’t work with other file formats, you have three choices:

1. Install a codec so WMP can play the file.

2. If you have Windows Media Center (WMC) (included with Vista Ultimate or Vista Home Premium), try playing the file on that.

3. Get a player and codec that will work.

WMP and WMC should both be able to play the same files. If WMC is installed, both players will also be able to play DVDs because WMC comes with a built-in MPEG-2 codec, which is required for DVD playback.

If you don’t have WMC on your flavor of Vista, you’ll need an MPEG-2 codec pack. I talk about that later in this chapter on p. 512 (in the section “I Can’t Play My DVDs!”).

If neither will play a file format, I recommend you look up the file extension of the video file on the Internet and then download a player that can be used to play it.

Table 15.1 shows a list of common file formats, their associated players, and where to download them.

Table 15.1. Common Video File Formats

AVI Weirdness

The AVI file format is short for Audio Visual Interleave. AVI files are odd beasts because they consist of two parts: a common wrapper, like bread around a sandwich, and the coded content (like a sandwich filling) that requires a specific codec to play it.

Several video codecs are used in AVI files’ content, as follows:

• DIVX codec: www.divx.com

• Cinepak codec: www.cinepak.com

• Indeo codec: www.Ligos.com

• DV codec

• Microsoft Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation (MS ADPCM)

• Uncompressed Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) codec

Before you panic and type “Microsoft Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation” into Google or scour the Internet for AVI-friendly codecs, be sure to read on because I solve almost all your codec woes in the next section.

Get Your Codecs Here

When a media player of any type chokes on a video file, I bet you your stash of peanut butter cups that it’s a codec problem. So, the way to proceed here is to first determine what the file format is and then hunt down a player. Usually, players come with their own codecs.

That said, there is a delicious codec panacea hidden in plain view on the Internet. It’s called the ACE Mega CoDecS Pack (see Figure 15.24), and it is downloadable for free from http://www.free-codecs.com/download/ACE_Mega_CoDecS_Pack.htm.

Figure 15.24. The ACE Mega CoDecS Pack contains pretty much every codec you’ll ever need.

The 43MB file contains pretty much every free codec on the Internet that you will ever need.

That includes codecs for all the AVI file variants. So go get it and install it now for ultimate codec bliss. Don’t you think Microsoft should release Windows Vista, the Andy Walker edition, with all these fun things preinstalled? OK, maybe not.

By the way, you owe me peanut butter cups. Fork ‘em over!

I Can’t Play My DVDs!

If, after all this, your DVDs still won’t play on your Vista computer, it might mean one of several things:

• You still don’t have an MPEG-2 codec (needed to play DVDs) on your system.

• The DVD is scratched, busted, or better suited to be a coffee coaster.

• Your DVD drive is pooched and either needs a new driver or needs to be replaced.

Here’s how to deal with each issue.

Install a DVD Codec

To play DVDs on a computer, you need an MPEG-2 codec. Your copy of Vista will have one preinstalled if it is either the Home Premium or Ultimate edition.

Your computer maker may have included a DVD player as bonus software, so Home Basic or Business versions might also be able to play DVDs if that’s included. If you received a software package that includes a DVD player with your computer but it wasn’t installed, then make sure you do, as DVD player software includes MPEG-2 codecs.

If you’re looking for a freebie, install a copy of the free VLC Player, as it comes with an MPEG-2 codec that allows you to play back DVDs (see Figure 15.25).

Figure 15.25. Grab your towel—VLC Player plays Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on DVD!

My favorite for worry-free and pristine DVD playback is to spend a few dollars on a commercial DVD player or codec pack.

I recommend the DVD codec pack from interVideo called DVD XPack (see Figure 15.26). It is linked here along with codec packs from several other vendors, http://tinyurl.com/knnfs, or find out more at www.intervideo.com.

Figure 15.26. For really great DVD playback, install a commercial MPEG-2 codec pack like the interVideo DVD XPack.

Check the DVD for Damage

A really damaged DVD won’t play at all, but one that’s scratched might stutter. If it stutters, inspect the nonlabel side of the disc to ensure that it’s not gouged or chomped by the dog. (Some DVDs are two-sided, so in that case, it doesn’t matter which side is up.)

Gently polish away any scuffs with a soft cloth and ditch discs that have a severely scratched surface.

If none of your DVDs work, including commercial movie discs, chances are that the DVD drive is broken.

Check Your DVD Drive

Finally, check the DVD drive to make sure its driver is up to date and installed properly:

1. Click the Windows button and type device manager.

2. Click Device Manager when it appears in the Start menu.

3. In the Device Manager, click the plus sign (+) next to the entry that says DVD/CD-ROM drives.

4. The optical drives installed on the system will appear in a list (see Figure 15.28). If there is an alert marker next to a drive with an exclamation mark in it, something is wrong with the drive.

Figure 15.28. Check the Device Manager for DVD driver problems.

5. Right-click on the drive and choose Properties. On the General tab, look for the Device Status box to read what the error status is.

6. When a drive is not working, this will usually tell you a driver is missing or not installed correctly.

7. If the driver needs an update, go ahead and update it. More information on how to update a driver can be found in Chapter 9 on p. 261 (in the section “Drivers: Update or Roll ‘em Back”).