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Q: Could you please help me? I use to could play DVD movies on my desktop. However,  now when i insert the disk, the dvd will not automatically open or play when i click it from the start menu. It use to run fine the past. 

– Adrian W.
Crestview, Fla

A: Well, Adrian, there are only a couple of things that could stop a DVD from playing.  The most obvious is that the DVD drive is bad.  There isn’t really any easy way to test for this, but if you’re not getting any device errors, and if you can read DVD-R discs (non-movie DVD data disks) it’s probably a safe bet that the drive is okay.  The other obvious problem is corrupted DVD player software.  Assuming the drive is actually working, the first thing I would try is uninstalling and re-installing the DVD software and see if that fixes the problem.  This software either came pre-loaded on your computer, or, if you purchased the DVD drive separately, it came along with that.  If you don’t have your original disks (after all the times I’ve harped on it?  For shame!) and if your system doesn’t have a built-in recovery partition as I covered in a recent column, you’ll need to visit the manufacturer’s website.  Unless you purchased the machine from “The Backseat of Joe’s Car Computers” the original equipment manufacturer should have it available for download and re-installation.

One thing that I see on occasion is that DVDs stop automatically playing when you insert them in the drive.  Several things can happen to cause that, most typically installing a different video viewer that usurps the job of playing DVDs away from the software you used to use. If you then remove the software that swiped the task, the system no longer knows what to do, so it simply does nothing.  To set, or re-set the action you want your computer to take when you insert a DVD, double-click on “My Computer” or hit the magic key combination [WinKey]+E to bring up Explorer.  In the list of drive letters, find your DVD drive.  Choose carefully, and make sure you get the right one!  Right-click on it, and select “Properties”.  On the dialog that pops up, select the “AutoPlay” tab. At the top, you should see “Select a content type, then choose an action for Windows to perform automatically when that type is used in this device:”  On that drop-down menu you will have at least one selection for “DVD Movie”, possibly one for “HD DVD Movie” and perhaps others.  You need to configure each one of them separately.  Let’s start with “DVD Movie”.  Select it, then in the “Actions” box, choose “Select an action to perform:”.  If your DVD Player software is properly installed, an icon will appear here, and you will have an option that says “Play DVD moving using (the software’s name)”.  Select that, and choose “Ok”.

A problem similar to losing the automatic playing of DVDs can happen with media files such as .MP3, .AVI, .MPG, .WAV and others when you install programs such as RealPlayer or QuickTime.  If you’re not careful during installation, these try to become the default player for all your media.  If you then uninstall, all your media file extensions are left with no association!   Fortunately, most media players provide a means to easily re-associate the media extensions with a few mouse clicks.