How to play DVDs on Windows 8.1

I just bought a Acer Aspire E5 laptop, which has Windows 8.1 and an internal DVD drive. It is a nice machine so I was startled when a DVD would not play. I could hear the disk spinning but there was no display or sound. After a lot of frustration and an online text chat with Acer support, I called and talked to a tech support person. It turns out that Windows 8.1 does not support Windows Media Player. The support person didn't at first have an answer, but she checked with other personal and was able to tell me that I could uninstall Windows Medial Player, then download and install the VLC media player app. I knew this player, as I have it on my PC, so I downloaded and installed it on my laptop, and was immediately able to play my DVD. This program is free and can be dodwnloaded at www.videolan.org.

Accepted answers

All comments

Sharanji

Windows 8.1 don't come with DVD movie playback capability. This is because Microsoft removed free DVD playback from Windows 8 due to the costs of licensing the codecs necessary to properly play DVDs. If you're running Windows 8.1 you can search for a DVD player app in the Windows Store, you need to purchses these Apps.

An additional piece of software is necessary to enable DVD playback. There are several free software packages that will enable this for you

You may use any of the free Apps that can be used to play DVD movies.

VLC plays DVDs and almost everything else out there. It’s completely free and open source. Just download the VLC player, install it, and pop in a DVD disc. Open the VLC application, click the Media menu, select Open Disc, and choose your DVD drive. VLC also supports unencrypted Blu-ray discs. Unfortunately, commercial Blu-ray movies will generally be encrypted. You can try using the third-party AACS dynamic library to make VLC play encrypted Blu-ray discs — if you’re looking for a Blu-ray player and don’t want to shell out any money, it’s worth a shot. .

CyberLink PowerDVD is popular among device manufacturers, and you’ll also occasionally see other programs like Corel WinDVD Pro. Don’t let the names fool you — both of these programs can also play Blu-ray movies. You can generally find this software on your system by pressing the Windows key to access the Start screen, and then typing “DVD” without quotes. Windows will search for programs with DVD in their name.