Two Months of Computer Hell! (Problems Playing DVDs)

[quagmire]

I’ve been through about two months of computer hell.
A friend was having financial problems and was selling his Dell desktop cheap. His is about a year old while mine was around five years old. He’s a Gamer so his computer has great graphics and is much faster then mine. Seemed like a good deal so I got it gave away mine.
It turned out that I was the first person to play a DVD on the new computer. At first it would not play most of my DVDs! Mainstream or porn, old or recent release, they would not work. The computer would freeze-up or crash. I would get “Program Not responding” messages and sometimes had to re-boot the damned thing.
So I took it several times to the computer stud at work. He installed and reinstalled many programs and other things. Downloaded lots of stuff including five or six different players all trying to find a way to play my DVDs. After a while it would play only older DVDs but not recently released ones. After many more weeks & tweaks he finally got it to play all mainstream discs and most of the adult ones.
I have two recently released disks from Pirate and Wicked that just would not play. “Program Not Responding” mostly. Sometimes they would cause the computer to crash. Oddly, say one in ten attempts, the damned things would play!?
Well it now looks like he fixed it. I sure hope so. Something to do with “codec coding” and “firmware files”. Being the technotard I am, I’m not real sure what any of that means or what he actually did. I was all ready to buy a new DVD driver but it turned out to be some kind of software problem and not a hardware problem. Very frustrating! Other then this it’s been a great computer.
Has anybody else experienced a similar situation? The computer stud and others who had also looked at it said they had never seen anything like this before. They are wondering if the last two discs had some kind of new anti piracy or anti copy protection things that the new computer couldn’t get past. Some wondered if the porn ones were just cheaply made or an inferior quality. But all these disks will play on a TV DVD player and I had played all but the newest one (Pirate) one on my old computer.
I’m worried about what will happen next time I purchase new DVDs.

[HypoLuxa-HermesPan]

It sounds like the firmware update did the trick and I would expect future discs you buy to play... good luck!

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by quagmire I have two recently released disks from Pirate and Wicked that just would not play. “Program Not Responding” mostly. Sometimes they would cause the computer to crash. Oddly, say one in ten attempts, the damned things would play!? Well it now looks like he fixed it. I sure hope so. Something to do with “codec coding” and “firmware files”. Being the technotard I am, I’m not real sure what any of that means or what he actually did.

Whenever a software multimedia player (such as Windows Media Player, Winamp or PowerDVD) tries to play a multimedia file such as a song or video on the computer it has to decode the data using the proper "codec." The codec is a external resource file that other programs call when needed to properly play content. The codec knows how to properly interpret the data stream contained in the music/video file and pipes it back to the player program so that you can see and hear it properly.

This arises because in the native format, music and especially video files are gigantic. To make them manageable, a wide variety of software is available to compress them. These "encoders" all use a different compression scheme, hence the need for different "codecs" on your system to handle the job.

Some examples of common compression schemes include MPEG-2 (video format used for dvds), MP3 (audio), WMA (Microsoft's audio), WMV (Microsoft's video), MPEG-4 (newer video format used by DivX, Xvid, Quicktime), FLAC (audio), ACC (Apple's audio), RV40 (Real Video) etc.

If you are missing essential codecs or have "bad" (i.e. buggy, old, non-standard) codecs installed on your system, you can run into the kind of trouble you experienced. Also, different programs may be configured by default to call certain codecs and some may work better than others.

Firmware can be thought of as a set of instructions (stored on a memory chip) for electronics such as DVD players, digital cameras, MP3 players etc. Often after products are released into the market, bugs are found or the manufacturer wishes to add features. This can be accomplished by "flashing" the memory chip that contains the firmware with the "new and improved" firmware.

It is entirely possible the DVD burner contained bugs that were fixed by the firmware update. You would have to read the firmware history list to see what the manufacturer changed.

I hope that helps you understand it a little bit better!

[quagmire]

Originally Posted by Snowman I hope that helps you understand it a little bit better!

Thanks Snowman.
I really do need to learn more about how computers work. But when I try it just ends up giving me a major headache. I think of my computer the same way that I think of my pick-up truck. As long as it starts up and takes me where I want to go I’m a happy camper. Being more self-sufficient would be a good thing. I’ve been lucky with the computer stud at work but sometimes it takes a while to get things done right. In this case it took two months to fix the problem!

[quagmire]

I finally got my f*ing computer fixed. At least I hope so!
Ever since I got it things just never work right. Problems playing DVDs, DVD and music player functions not working properly, freezing up for no reasons, long times when starting up and down load things. One day everything seemed to work fine then for the next three it would be one thing after another.
So I took the damned thing to the previous owner and we (he) cleaned everything out of it, reformatted and reinstalled everything. Works like a champ now – the computer I thought I was getting last year.
Lesson learned here is when getting a used computer reformat and reinstall everything before taking it home. That would have saved me months of computer hell. But be sure you back up the files and things you want to keep off the computer! Once everything is wiped off the computer it’s gone forever and you can never recover it!

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by quagmire Lesson learned here is when getting a used computer reformat and reinstall everything before taking it home. That would have saved me months of computer hell.

That's probably very good advice when buying a used system so long as you have recovery discs. An unavoidable PIA that follows however are all the annoying Windows updates that will be needed. It will seem endless!

I recently had a hard drive boot sector become corrupted and had to do the same thing. Unfortunately, I lost the e-machine recovery disc but I had another e-machine disc on hand from a similar model that worked OK.

I'm glad to hear your system is finally working well. Too bad all your problems dragged on much more than two months at this point. It's more like five or six months now!