I resently bought a Video CD and was told it would run in windows media player, but when I got it how it won't read it, can any1 help me in the quest to get my VCD working? If so, do....

thanx for the help Richard Rhodes a.k.a TOADSY

-- Richard Rhodes (richard@rhodeses.freeserve.co.uk), October 18, 1999

Answers

Buy Xing's MPEGPlayer or CyberLink's PowerDVD. They play VCDS much better and have way more features than Microshaft's products.

-- The Lone Ranger (rutger_s@hotmail.com), October 18, 1999.

Lone, allow me to disagree with you. Xing has a lot more features than Media Player, but when it comes to quality, it DEPENDS on the video card you have. I've tested that with Diamond Viper cards, the quality of Media Player 6.4 is far, far better than Xing's.

To Richard: 1) Download the latest version of Media Player (v.6.4) from Microsoft's site: www.microsoft.com/downloads, 2) Once you have it go: File --> Open --> go to the directory of your VCD where music01.dat is located (I don't remember its name), 3) Select "All files" at the bottom, because if you don't you won't be able to see the .dat file listed, 4) Select the .dat file, click open, and then right click on the Window and select "full screen". G.L!

Matias.

-- Matias (petrellm@telefonica.com.ar), October 20, 1999.

Matias. you are wrong, LR is right, xing is much better. MS Media player cannot play some of VCD 2.0 format, you can open and read the .dat but it will give you filter errors.!

-- chen (chen_sw@hotmail.com), October 20, 1999.

I use XING on a Dell Notebook - Inspiron 7000 and I must say it works ok. BUT,,,,, In full screen there are video slips. When I view the same files under the Microsoft latest MPLAYER2 the presentation is supurb without any skips. Unfortunatly MPLAYER2 can only view 1 file at a time. For the absolute best quality in presentation MPLAYER2 is best as far as I'm concerned. If you make the screen size anything smaller than full screen XING works fine without skips. I do have a top of the line notebook and my notebook full screen looks better than any TV.... I haven't tried the other viewer mentioned yet...

-- Texas Bill (bill@billbryson.com), October 23, 1999.

Media Player won't play The Matrix VCD and H20 VCd from Malaysia. the best one is PowerDVD which decoeds video very well. Even at full screen. Also Media Player can crash certain configurations.

-- The Lone Ranger (rutger_s@hotmail.com), October 23, 1999.