Windows Can't play DVD with projector attached!

Hey all,
Having a bit of a nightmare, that I've sort of fixed.

If I attach a VGA projector (standard blue vga lead) to my laptop (vista basic) , media player and powerdvd both refuse to play a disc, stating "Cannot play dvd. copy protection problem between dvd drive decoder and video card. Install latest dvd and video card drivers".

This made me so mad - this is a disc I actually paid for, I'm not using it for non-personal use, and I don't understand the issue. Once again, the stupid copy protection they use tries to preach to the converted, and leaves the wrong people out in the cold - I'm better pirating DVDs if this happens

I do have the latest drivers, and whilst these two won't play it, I managed to discover that for some reason VLC will

Does anyone know the particular reason every media player I've tried bar VLC refuses to play dvds down an analogue projector, and any workarounds other than using VLC?

 

Will the dvd play normally on the laptop without the projector attached?
What OS you using?

VLC comes bundled with codecs, so makes me wonder if maybe lacking the dvd codec for the other applications.

 

It's Vista basic, and it plays all dvds just fine without the projector attached, pretty weird

 

ah, isn't drm wonderful? your VGA port is not HDCP protected, it's blocking you from playing the DVD because you could theoretically connect a video capture device to the VGA port to illegally copy the DVD. VLC works because it uses DeCSS to break the copy protection before playing it.

there are no workarounds other than the one VLC uses, you could break the copy protection yourself with some other implementation of DeCSS - dvdshrink or dvddecrypter or the like.

edit: except vista isn't supposed to require HDCP for DVD - only for HDDVD and Blu-ray

 

Supertoad: Thats what I thought, and doesn't that only apply to digital outputs? (might be wrong on the latter). Surely this is just the same as having a monitor plugged into a vga port on any computer, can the system distinguish between a monitor and something else?

 

HDCP doesn't just apply to digital outputs - this is exactly the concern of it. if content requires HDCP, any outputs not capable of HDCP (like vga, s-video, or older DVI) would be blocked from playback. but like i said, i didn't think that it applied to DVDs, and i thought it was just supposed to knock the resolution down, not completely stop it. it sounds to me like there is some bug in the windows DRM bits or in the DRM section of your gfx drivers. have you tried downgrading to an earlier version of the drivers?

 

Thanks for your help supertoad. I was just more curious as to the root cause, as I was a bit miffed that I'm being forced to use VLC when vista supposedly does it off the bat... As I can watch the occasional film by using VLC, I'll probably just leave it at that, in case a downgrade introduces new problems

 

cheers. my rule of thumb with media is "if i can't play it in VLC, i don't want to watch it"