Using external DVD drive on Windows 8 - and it's not playing DVDs

[danstan21]

Hi all, looking for some advice. Bought a Liteon external DVD drive for my Windows 8 laptop, and it's giving me trouble - I've imported audio CDs into iTunes just fine, and I can open/browse the file contents of a DVD - but it's not letting me actually play it. I've tried on windows media player and downloaded VLC player but no luck. Any suggestions?

[briareos_kerensky]

No problems with a Plextor external drive and Media Player Classic (K-Lite condec pack) on Win8; My laptop also came with PowerDVD, so I don't know from where the MPEG-2 codecs came. Maybe search for a free MPEG-2 codec and see if it solves anything?

[danstan21]

I gave that a go, but the problem persists. It's very weird. When I plug the DVD drive in and place a DVD in, it even gives me the prompt of "Choose what you'd like to do for DVD films", at which I choose "Play using VLC player", which opens VLC but simply does nothing (although the disc is spinning). It doesn't even give an error. I've tried with more than one DVD so I know it's not a duff disc

[briareos_kerensky]

I personally wouldn't use VLC, it always gave me more problems than anything, even with formats it should support.

[danstan21]

Right, I managed to solve the problem, by accidentally leaving the DVD player running when I left the room. It turns out that the DVD drive is just hella slow and it takes 2 minutes to actually start playing... thanks for the help anyway briareos!

[briareos_kerensky]

That's one slow drive. Does it behave the same with other media types or computers?