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By default the Windows XP Windows Media Player does not support DVDs. It links to their site which suggests different vendors where you have to pay for DVD codecs/decoders. I have found some free ones on the internet but they only give me issues.

This older superuser question was helpful but the accepted answer only gave me video playback without any audio playback.

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    Warning: If you live in a country that respects U.S. patent law, watching a DVD without paying a royalty for the codec is against the law. IANAL but I would highly recommend that you take the safe route and just buy a professional codec. You're less likely to run into problems like "audio won't play" that way, anyway.
    – allquixotic
    Commented Aug 13, 2012 at 15:17
  • Also see meta.superuser.com/questions/5372/…
    – allquixotic
    Commented Aug 13, 2012 at 15:20
  • @allquixotic Thanks for the heads up. I'll be careful how I word this type of question if it ever comes up again.
    – cyborgcommando0
    Commented Aug 13, 2012 at 15:25
  • @allquixotic: Please also see this discussion: meta.superuser.com/questions/2212/…
    – Oliver Salzburg
    Commented Aug 13, 2012 at 15:50
  • @OliverSalzburg: It's not about breaking DRM; it's about violating patent law. They are not the same thing. It is conceivable that breaking DRM could infringe on a patent, but the question of whether we're "breaking DRM" or not is immaterial if we can already identify a more clear-cut violation of the law; namely, patents. That meta question doesn't say "it's okay to give users links to software that, upon use, would immediately criminalize the user in the majority of the industrialized world".
    – allquixotic
    Commented Aug 13, 2012 at 16:08

1 Answer 1

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It will be quite hard to work out which codec you have used (or not) and just sending you lots of links may not be preferable. So as a work around you can use this free player: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

EDIT
As per warsong suggestion, you could try http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/

As per your request, this Google Search page of XP codecs is the best I can offer.

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  • MPC HC is actually far better
    – warsong
    Commented Aug 13, 2012 at 15:01
  • I would prefer to use Windows Media Player as the codec that works will be installed on multiple computers that already have WMP.
    – cyborgcommando0
    Commented Aug 13, 2012 at 15:04

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