I’m really ticked off. When I get really ticked off, I get pretty quiet; hence, little posting as well.
I’m still having problems with getting a brand new DVD player to work on the house computer (the laptop needed a stupid "workaround" that I think needs to be done each time) in either Windows Media Player or in the Nero Software that came with the Pioneer unit.
In Windows Media Player, I got the "lower your resolution and color" message, but no matter what I do, it still won’t play. Seems it’s a problem of video codecs, but who the hell knows how to figure out which ones I need? I downloaded a Windows program that should tell me, but it doesn’t. Why, when it’s the latest version of the Player, and using Win XP, can’t they figure out how to get it to work with all the various video cards and codecs before they sell it? This is why I’m pissed at Bill Gates, who–and I don’t begrudge him his money, actually admire him for being a self-made man, and don’t care how he spends his money–comes off like the greatest philanthropist by donating (tax-write-off) so much to the third world countries for AIDS research, and yet has come by that money by charging exorbitant price for software that doesn’t work. Yep, that’s you and me paying the price, the middle-class average American worker who’s the real money behind the donations. And, we don’t even get to feel good about it, despite not getting the credit for it, because it’s so damned frustrating to make the software work.
And the other thorn in my side today: Nero is the packaged software with the DVD/CD WRW Pioneer player that’s supposed to make all these wonderful things happen. It put about six icons on my desktop and took over a part of the toolbar. But, can it play a DVD?
No.
It seems that you need to upgrade the software to the version that will allow all this to happen. For a price of $79.95.
I really really really hate people today.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Have you tried uninstalling Nero and seeing if WMP will work. Nero has A LOT of compatibility issues, especially when there are other programs on a PC that do similar things as Nero.
I am not a fan of Nero products at all. Just about everyone I know has tried Nero at some point or another, and just about all of them have some kind of issue. (PowerDVD on the other hand is an excellent program. The full “standard version” is just $50 and includes video capture capabilities and a lot of other cool stuff.)
WMP wouldn’t work prior to the new DVD player, and on this computer, it’s showing the “lower resolution, etc” which didn’t show up on the laptop version of WMP (same, updated to WMP 11). On the laptop, I’m waiting to download (for only $19.95!) an MPEG-2 decoder that should work with the Intel Indio (sp) codecs with the Nvidia card.
I did upgrade the Nero software because I was at my wit’s end, and I see what you mean: Just like Norton Antivirus (who I also hate with a passion and use McAfee’s Viruscan only), it takes over the other programs. It wants to open the Word documents for Pete’s sake! If I can’t cut back its tentacles somewhat, I’ll unload it. But for now, at least the DVD is working.
I think that if I merely rolled back to WMP 9, I would have been okay. But then, how long before more problems came up because Microsoft wants you to have the latest version only (and at a less than reasonable cost). I suspect they infiltrate the new programs with glitches that make the old programs corrupt to force the issue of upgrading.
Rolling back to a previous version of WMP was my next suggestion as well. I never do the updates. I’m happy with WMP as it is so if it ain’t broke…
Amen! on Norton. I got AOL’s free 1-year service (all I could afford). There’s no boot-disk capabilities, but otherwise it is very good. The defs update automatically at least twice a day (not once a week).