DVD has Jerky Playback on Windows computers

[Tim Palmer-Benson]

Hello:
After producing a SD DVD 16:9 from FCP Pro Rez, I am discovering that the discs I am producing play back in a jerky fashion on a Windows Media Player. The discs play back fine on a regular DVD player and also playback fine on my Mac

I have someone who wants to view the discs on their computer....should I provide a wmv file or a Quicktime file instead?


Tim

[William Hohauser]

Advise them to use VLC for Windows or a pay program like WinDVD. If the disks work in a regular DVD player, it's likely that the PC has an issue, however, check the quality of your DVD blanks, you might want to step up to Fuji or Taiyo Yuden.

[Tim Palmer-Benson]

I am noticing the same thing on my MacIntel running Windows XP. Commercial disks from Netflicks won't play because of some licensing issue and even some tutorial discs I got from Joel Perigine are jerky too. I thought Windows users often use their machines for movie playback and didn't know that had to get other software to do it!

I remember seeing Windows machines play movies five years ago, so what is going on?

Tim

[William Hohauser]

I don't know as I never use Windows machines for DVD playback (rarely Macs either). As you said, I have seen DVDs playing fine on Windows machines in the past but there have been issues as of late with WMP and DVDs as some people have posted here on DVinfo. I don't know if this is on certain machines or related to certain DVDs. I have a great DVD player that plays everything but will not play any commercial DVD from Criterion, go figure that out.

[Robert Lane]

Problem is the old dvdplay.exe program had serious licensing issues dating back to WinME and XP which is why support for it was dropped.

WMP was never optimized for DVD playback; it's only been recently that MS added MPEG-2 layer DVD playback capabilities to WMP after fussing over licensing issues with the DVD Forum but it's a code-hack basically and doesn't contain the licensed codecs to play commercial (big studio) DVD-spec discs.

One of the best Win-based DVD playback software packages:

DirectDVD Home Page

Other options would be Cyberlink PowerDVD or Intervideo WinDVD players for about the same money. Any of those three players will give you pure DVD-playback capabilities and add all the goodies normally found on set-top players (alt angles, subtitles etc). There's also a Blu-Ray plug-in included in some of the above options for the same price - assuming you have or plan on getting a BR capable drive.