EggXpert

I have a Gateway M-1412 laptop computer.  I just did a fresh restore install of all software.  The drive works great on software and audio cd's.  Unfortunately, when I try movies, some dvd's work while others don't.  These are all just regular store bought movies.  These same dvd's work on all my other computer.  Very strange.  The dvd's are not even recognized on the e drive when I go to my computer.  BTW, I am running Vista Home Premium 32 bit.  I down loaded K-lite codec codes hoping that would help.  It didn't.  Does anyone have any ideas?  Do you think a new drive would work?  Thank you for the help.

Well you should not have a problem with the lappy doing this at all. What app are you using to try an view the DVD movies on? WMP11, WMP10, WinDVD, DirectDVD 8, ALShow, n.player, Quicktime, ect....

Windows Media Player 11. 

OK in WMP11 go to options then go in to DVD. Click on advanced under Language properties. Look for MPEG2, and make sure its shows libmpg2 and DVD decoding is checked.

I did as you said.  MPEG2 was disabled so I selected the option you said and insured that the DVD encoding was enabled and rebooted.  It still does not work.  I put in a Star Wars DVD and nothing happens.  I go to Computer and selected the E drive which is the DVD and I get the message Insert a disk.  The drive is not even seeing the DVD.  As I said before, it sees some DVD's and all of the software and audio cd's.  I even downloaded Vista SP2 which requires you to burn the image on a DVD.  I did and it reads that fine.  Thanks.  It is just some movie DVD's.

Did you have your laptop modified at all? The only reason that it will not see a DVD is that the optical drive is not DVD capable.

 

No mods.  I have googled the problem and it seems like others have similar problems with all brands of laptops.  As an example, I have the Star Wars series, about half the movies run fine while the others are not even seen by the drive.  However, Vista does see the drive as the E-drive.  It just does not see the dvd disk in the drive.  You can hear the disk spinning.  You double click on the icon and the drive door slides out and it say to insert a disk.  The movies that work I do nothing.  I put it in and media player opens and there is the movie.  Same with audio  cd's.

Well this is your laptop specs here http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/2008/Avalon/2906028R/2906028Rsp2.shtml, for the Optical drive it lists, 8X Multi-Format Dual Layer DVDRW with DVD-RAM with Labelflash™ by defult. So download this and see if you can play a DVD at all. http://www.snapfiles.com/get/directdvd.html Also if you cannot download this here http://www.snapfiles.com/get/hwinfo.html and take a look at what they say the optical drive is installed.

Thank you for your help.  The drive is seen in Vista and works for almost everything except for some movies.  I do like that system recognition program. This computer benchmarks pretty well.  I think I might raise the memory to 4MB.  Let me know if you have any other ideas.  Maybe it will work when I upgrade to Windows 7.  Thank you again.

I hope you mean 4GB if its 4MB we will be back in the old X386 days. Did you download the free trial DVD8 as well and see if it would do anything at all?

4GB, that's what I meant.  Yes I did download it and it did not help any. Another example is I have the 6 Star War movies.  Some of them play and the others are not seen by the player.  The dvd unit is the LG/Hitachi GSA T20F.

Well I checked google and it seems that some people are having the same issue you are in the first link in one way. Now if the player works with some DVDs but not others usually that indicates there is a problem with copy write. And if that is the case then that means the player will not allow this, and there is no fix for that issue.

I wonder why a computer manufacturer would supply a drive that can not read all movies.  I did not get this to play movies but I would have think that it should be able to do so.  Oh well, it is what it is.  I certainly would not want to sell this computer knowing what I know without full disclosure.  Thank you for your help.

Yep not a problem at all, sorry for the bad news on it.