DVD Woes

Now that I have this nifty HTPC set up as a DVR, there's almost nothing on TV worth recording. So I decided to pull out a DVD and tried to watch it. First I tried using SageTV, but it gave me a strange message: "There was a DVD Error in playback. Details: sage.PlaybackException: ERROR (-8, 0x2): There is a problem playing the DVD content due to Macrovision or CSS." (An error message only a programmer could love.)

Then I tried with Windows Media Player, but it gave me a message on the opposite end of details, but not any more helpful: "Windows Media Player cannot play DVD video. You might need to adjust your Windows display settings. Open display settings in Control Panel, and then try lowering your screen resolution and color quality settings." I tried that and it didn't help.

Finally, I tried to play it with WinTV, which gamely gave it a try. The audio was great, but the video was a mess.

I talked with my friend Uwe about this. He had already given me a set of video files to try watching on a DVD and I didn't have any luck with them either, but they were in some fancy formats and we were doubtful I had the right software from the start. However, I really thought that a standard DVD would play. So Uwe suggested that I download the trial version of Cyberlink's PowerDVD and try that. I did and it was able to play the DVD. The funny thing was that, magically, so was SageTV. (However, Media Player was still complaining about the screen resolution.) SageTV working told me that the machine was missing a CODEC for DVD.

CODEC is merely a combination of the two words COmpression and DECompression, as MODEM is MOdulate and DEModulate. Where as a MODEM takes a digital signal, converts it to analog for transmission over a phone line, and then converts it back to digital, a CODEC takes an analog source, converts compresses it for transmission (or storage), and then decompresses it for playback. Originally, a CODEC was a piece of hardware like a MODEM, but these days it also can be a piece of software that is used for decompression of various audio and video formats. This functionality must be built into Windows at some level, since SageTV was able to make use of the CODEC that was installed by PowerDVD.

My guess is that SageTV did not install the CODEC either because I installed a trial version, or they want me to purchase a more expensive version with more media format support (CODECs). Either way, I'm not sure that I want to have both PowerDVD and SageTV installed, so I uninstalled PowerDVD and, as I hoped, SageTV stopped being able to play DVDs.

I will have to meditate on what is the best solution for this problem, but at least I know what the problem is. (As oppose to the remote control issue, where I'm still clueless.)