March 20, 2004

Kill Bill

Warning: long tedious rant about the unbelievably useless Microsoft Windows XP follows.

At 18:52 this evening, my dad asked me if I could fix DVD playback on my parents' Windows XP machine. I didn't think it would be a problem - hey, I have Remote Desktop Connection, and it should just be a case of installing an appropriate player, right?

Wrong.

It's now 21:30, and we still aren't seeing stuff on screen.

After recovering from the horrible shock of finding Microsoft don't bundle a DVD player with Windows XP, I looked around for alternatives. My first choice was to try VLC for Windows, since I use VLC happily in Linux and Mac OS X, and it's free. It didn't want to play DVDs. Having seen the interface to it in Windows, I figured it was also a bad choice as it's a bit unfriendly.

My next choice was Cyberlink PowerDVD SE, since I used to have their player on my old laptop and it worked fine. They appear to offer a simple codec which integrates with Windows Media Player, which seemed like a good idea from a parental usability point of view. I installed it, but now I keep getting this:

Windows Media Player

Strange. I installed the codec bundle on my WinXP laptop, to see if I was missing something, and it worked fine. First time. No problems. No reboot required or anything. It just worked.

So. Two machines, running the same operating system and the same DVD playback software, and one works whilst the other doesn't.

My final last-ditch solution is to upgrade anything in sight on the machine via Windows Update. It already has all critical security updates, but hey, I guess there might be a codec update in the Advanced Networking Pack or something. Yes, I'm getting desperate.

What really annoys me is that I'm a supposedly advanced computer user, and I'm having a hellish nightmare making this work. How the heck is Aunt Tillie supposed to deal with this shit? Why on earth did Microsoft not include a DVD player? I hope they are happy that they are losing customers because of their cheap attempt at further gouging money out of punters ($20 in this case). I'm off to buy my folks an iMac.

I think I'm gonna go get me a beer now.

Currently listening to If Things Were Perfect from the album Play by Moby

Posted by savs at March 20, 2004 9:30 PM
Comments

Interestingly, isn't the focus of the EU case against Microsoft on their bundling applications with the OS? How do you decide where to draw the line? Why is it when politicians and bureaucrats finally pick up on important issues, they still manage to miss the point?

Posted by: Steve D at March 21, 2004 9:36 PM

I agree with the point Steve D raises - the problem isn't that the application isn't bundled, it definitely shouldn't be bundled. The problem is that meejah is tied so deeply into Windows that it's difficult to install third-party apps which work easily.

In your case, you may actually be being stymied by hardware (dodgy driver for a hardware codec, maybe? Laptops don't tend to have them; desktops sometimes do, at least in part), and the possible inability to run MPEG in software.

Personally, I don't buy the Aunt Tillie business either ;) Aunt Tillie, who apparently compiles kernels IIRC, is a figment of ESR's imagination and another example of Raymondite Jargonfile revisionism :o)

Posted by: Alex Hudson at March 22, 2004 6:46 PM