My sound for DVDs are not working I’m trying to use Windows Media Player. I re-installed it already once but it still wont play the sound. Everthing works but the sound.
Are your speakers on? Are they plugged into the computer? Is the volume on? Is the DVD player plugged into the Sound Card?
Other video and sound works just not DVD.
DVD Sound
Is there a seperate volume slider for DVD’s under the sound mixer? Maybe Line-In?
Have you tried any other DVD programs? My experience with Windows Media player & DVD’s is that it bites… Unless they’ve made serious changes in the last couple years…
I went to see if a slider was off and line-in was but it didnt do any thing so its not with that. Thanks for the help so far though.
I dont have any other DVD playing software but I’d be willing you try anything free.
who installed your dvd player? If it was an after market job, it’s possible that the audio cable is not connected. One way to check would be to play an audio cd through the DVD player.
Hope that helps,
Daniel
It came with the computer its a dvd rom drive it worked well and had sound and it still works fine but just dosnt have the sound.
I think its just windows media player after updating to the new version 9 I think screwed it up.
If you know of a good free dvd player software I can use I’m sure I can play them fine.
Audio Cable
Actually, the audio cable doesn’t have anything to do with the DVD playback. The audio cable is a holdover from the CDROM days. A CD-ROM drive can play back a CD without needing any software on the computer at all (though most don’t have a way to control it. Some though do have a play/stop button, and most/many have a volume control with a headphone jack on the front.) When CD-ROM’s first came out, most computers couldn’t make any noise aside from primitive beeps and such, CD’s were used for mass storage. Since people were paying $600+ for a CD-ROM, it wasn’t a big deal to add the chips to let them play music CD’s as well…
Since DVD drives also play CD’s, they have that same audio cable that CD-ROMs had. The actual decoding of a DVD’s sound stream is done by the DVD software (unless you have a DVD decoder in hardware, but that’s a whole other topic.)
Do you have the latest version of Windows Media Player? The latest versions of all your drivers? Have you seen the light and decided to switch to Linux? 
(Yes, I’m Biased)
John Childs do you have any input now that you’re back. I still have that same problem. Re-install did nothing.
Windows Media Player 9 (or any other version) does not support playing DVDs right out of the box. You have to buy a DVD decoder pack that installs the codecs necessary to play DVDs. Note: the above DVD packs are for Windows XP. I don’t know if they’re backwards compatible with other versions of Windows.
Many computer DVD drives come with DVD player software bundled in. This is the usual method for getting DVD playback.
Another option is to buy a full featured DVD player like PowerDVD or WinDVD. But the full featured standalone DVD players are expensive.
Since it seems you’re able to play the video off a DVD in Windows Media Player, I have to assume that you’ve somehow managed to install an MPEG-2 decoder that is compatible with Windows Media Player. If you’re only having problems with the audio then try installing the AC3 Filter. The audio on DVDs is encoded with AC3 so you’ll need an AC3 decoder to play the audio. Maybe, just maybe, that little AC3Filter will allow you to play the audio on DVDs.
Drivers
If it’s a problem with Windows Media not having the software for DVD playback, you could try and find the free codecs… They’re out there somewhere, I think based on the DeCSS code but I don’t rightly know.
I do know PowerDVD is a pretty good player though. Have you tried the admittedly crappy InterActual player that comes with many DVD’s? Just about any DVD that has bonus features for your computer has InterActual… or something else… I forget the name…
You can also try the AC3ACM decompressor.
Read the readme.txt file to see how to install the codec. You’ll need to right-click on the INF file and select “install”.
Tim, try this
It was originally for linux/beOS, but it has been ported to windows.
Tim, you made me waste space on the unicyclist forum because you couldn’t remember videolan.org from my house to your’s. For shame. 