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The overlay fullscreen setting has always been a horrible hack. Last time I used it, I couldn't minimize the video player window while it was playing or the video would stop or go away, and I also had to keep at least one pixel on-screen as well. Which meant leaving an annoying obstruction on my screen.

The better solution is to just set up a normal dual-head configuration and get a video player capable of handling that correctly, such as Zoom Player for Windows.

I've been on Linux for a while, and I've got a multi-screen setup with video out to my SDTV, and my sound card is split to give separate audio to both my TV and my PC speakers, and I have MythTV set up to be usable with a remote without bothering the person using the computer. All from a single computer with one (nvidia) video card and the motherboard-integrated sound card.

I watch a lot of fansubbed anime & find I prefer Zoomplayer http://inmatrix.com/

I also am using a 6 year old IBM laptop that isn't too powerful & I find Zoom uses less memory & less processing power. Therefore less lag & better rendering.

I believe this is due to the fact that the actual Zoom player is a sort of framework and all the codecs are external.

It used to be a beast to set-up the codecs but now it has an excellent codec installer which downloads the latest needed codecs (you have control over which) and installs them, usually perfectly.

The only thing I found recently was that I couldn't get it to play Flash .flv although I had Flash installed. Turned out I had Flash installed on Firefox & Zoomplayer needed the IE OCX control - once I fired up IE and installed Flash it worked fine.

Zoom is well-tuned for speed & accuracy and handles subtitles beautifully with complete positioning & display options including font selection.

There is even an U3 version that runs from a USB stick http://software.u3.com/Product_Details.aspx?ProductId=114

It is of course a paid Windows application so I guess everyone here is going to put it down.

Seconded for ZoomPlayer. VLC used to be my default player, but it kept occasionally crashing to desktop, and it had laggy controls sometimes. Mediaplayer classic used to be my default player until I started using Vista64, and I couldn't get it to run at all most of the time.

ZoomPlayer just seems to run everything I throw at it, has a decent interface, and has no lag on controls etc.

Codec packs are for suckers, I think most people should know that by now. Even when everything in them is legit, you end up with a dozen codecs for a given format, which you don't need, and are bound to create problems. Besides which, you want to be sure you're using the best codecs for a given format, which is harder when you have a dozen to chose from. You should always install individual codecs for a specific format. Go to this page for a list of all common formats and specific codecs to use for each of them (they also make a bitchin' media player, and, no, I do not work for them). I followed this guide to install codecs on my system, and I have yet to run into a video format I can't play.

Actually, I have run into one "format" I can't play, and that's Vodei. Another problem with codecs is jerks like this. The video and audio are already encoded, but they add an additional useless layer so you have to buy the vodei "codec" to play a movie, even though you may already have the proper codecs to actually decode the video data. So just a brief PSA, don't buy vodei or download movies that use it, it's a scam

In short, do it yourself and you'll do it correctly, stay away from codec packs.

Zoom Player has a horrible name, but it was good enough to earn my cash.

I recommend these programs to all my co-workers, friends and family.
BlueFrog - Fight spam with the Blue Community
DefilerPak - Video/Audio Codec Pak
FireFox - IE replacement
Foobar2000 - Audio Player
MyUninstaller - ADD/Remove Programs alternative
Nero - CD/DVD burning software
NOD32 - Very fast and accurate Virus Scanner
Thunderbird - Outlook Express Replacement
Treewalk DNS - Local caching DNS
Trillian - Many IM Clients in One
UltraEdit32 - Best Windows Text Editor (check out column mode)
UltraMon - If you multiple monitors this program is great
Zoomplayer - DVD/Media player

I don't know about you but I'd rather have Windows Media Player than RealPlayer or Quicktime installed by default.

Well, I don't know about you - but I would much rather have mplayer, Zoomplayer or Classic Media Player installed by default then Windows Media Player

The point here is currently only one entity can decide.

Good media players: ZoomPlayer (for DVD playback is not free) or MPC (is, but less pretty). use Dscaler5 and ffdshow and you're set. oh, add something like DVD43 for de-CSS and other bullshit removal. I use this on my HTPC and with some careful setup its the bees knees. Certainly nothing complains about piracy here :D. Glad to be of service.

Try TextPad and Zoom Player.

Zoom Player http://www.inmatrix.com/
VideoLAN http://www.videolan.org/
VirtualDub http://www.virtualdub.org/

Vote with your wallets by buying only region-free players or players that are obviously designed to allow the removal of regions, and DVDs with no region specificity.

See http://www.inmatrix.com/drives.shtml

Windows Media Player has only the most basic features. This and the fact than in XP it sends home the titles of the films, makes it useless for me. Keeping Zoom Player and VLC.

In terms of features it is well possible to innovate over the previous versions of WMP.

The Bat! - An Email client

ZoomPlayer - A video player

FlashFXP - an FTP client.

UltraEdit - A text editor

PuTTY - A Telnet/SSH client

Yahoo Messenger - An IM program

Kazaa Lite - To get even more stuff

BitTorrent - A BT Client

Google Toolbar - A toolbar for IE to use google easily and quickly

ACDSee - An image viewer

1. GeoShell - I find the Explorer shell to suck and GeoShell is rather stable, quick to install/configure, and highly usable.
   
2. Firefox
   
3. Thunderbird
   
4. Winamp - I enjoy that 5.x comes with Milkdrop standard.
   
5. Miranda-IM - I used to have stability issues with older builds of Miranda but after that went away I haven't looked back at Trillian or the stand-alone apps.
   
6. Zoom Player - I don't quite like Winamp for movies, Zoom Player is excellent.
   
7. PowerDVD - for the codec.
   
8. MSYS and MinGW
   
9. SciTE - I used Editplus for some time until I found this.
   
10. WinRAR - I like the interface, for the most part, and it handles most formats.

I definitely am not into the new style of "chunky" interfaces. I agree, the plain simple window is best. I use ZoomPlayer as my default player. It's nice configurable but simple interface, plus the skipping frames with the scroll wheel has me hooked.

You didn't mention whether you were looking to run Linux or Windows or OS X, but I think the principles are the same.

This is a good Windows-only setup using mostly freeware tools:

DVD Decrypter to rip the DVDs to macrovision-free/region-free ISO images

Daemon Tools to mount the isos as virtual drives on demand

MyHTPC as a TV-friendly filesystem shell (in combination with some simple batch scripts to control Daemon Tools, several of which can be found in the MyHTPC forums)

Zoom Player to play the DVDs (it's fast, full-featured, and you can turn off the GUI entirely which is nice on a TV.

You will also want WinDVD: not to play the DVDs, because the interface is so bulky and slow, but because you will need good MPEG-2 codecs and I don't know of any free ones as good as the filters that come with WinDVD. Zoom Player has a feature that automatically finds the codecs and registers them for you. (AC3Filter is a free AC3 audio codec that is comparable to InterVideo's.)

There are loads of ways to do it in OS X and Linux. Somebody who knows better than me is sure to post them.

You can get custom hacked firmware for your drive, specified by manufacturer and drive-revision. This makes your drive RPC1, ie enables unlimited sone-changes.

Take a look at thid dvd firmware page. There are probably alot more pages, but this was the first I found with google.

If you use Windows however, you should beware. Your OS or/and Player might be counting too. Use DVD Genuie.

That should get rid of those nasty zones.

Yes, because we all know how effective region codes are, don't we? Surely even the movie industry must have realized by now there is no way of creating digital media such that it is both enjoyable and uncopyable by the end user.

Have you tried Zoomplayer? Even the free version is WAY better than WMP. And the Pro version is almost unbeatable.

DVD Region Free costs 40 bucks. Check out DVD Genie.

These codec packs are nothing but trouble, they WILL fuck up your system.

Codec configuration for windows

WARNING: DO NOT INSTALL CODEC PACKS

These codec packs are nothing but trouble, they WILL fuck up your system.

Codec configuration for windows

WARNING: DO NOT INSTALL CODEC PACKS

Try Zoom Player for video. The free version won't play DVD's but for the rest it's a blast.

I tend to use Winamp for audio and Zoom Player (zPlayer) for video.

Use ZoomPlayer instead of Windows Media Player.

I'll start by giving the direct link to Zoom Player.

I'll follow up by shedding light on why we haven't heard about it:

"Zoom Player Standard remains Free for Non-Commercial use, while Zoom Player Professional comes in a Fully Functional (uncrippled) trial version and requires registration ($19.95 U.S.)."

Didn't you know? We're Free Software advocates, not free software advocates.

Mplayer rule them all? Yeah right, I guess Linux that zealots haven't ever heard Zoom Player. (It rules already)
Zoom Player

An alternative to WMP is Zoom Player (free here which is completely free (unless users want the pro version).

WMP sucks hardcore. Use Zoomplayer. Yes it's windows, but oh my God, it rocks.

HD DVD is still in a blue-laser MPEG-2 vs. red-laser MPEG-4 fight, but digital VCRs already exist and do let you record high definition programming.

It's called D-VHS. D-Theater is a standard on top of that that adds tough encryption for distribution of Wacky Jack V.'s movies so they'll be hard to back up.

The limitation of D-VHS in recording is that you're depending on a tuner to give you signals. 8VSB-broadcast-only (OTA or "over the air") tuners may never be DRM-crippled by the proposed broadcast flag, but satellite and combo HD-OTA/sat tuners are subject to nasty firmware upgrades with Digital Restrictions Managed. It's possible that even OTA-only tuners will be upgraded with MPEG private section data, but that reqires cooperation of broadcasters.

There are also OTA-only HD tuner cards for PCs. Whether there are backdoors for "upgrading" the DRM if the broadcast flag flies is left as an exercise (try SoftICE). The streams that at least one of the cards captured are not "in the clear," which gives you an idea of the mfg.'s intentions. There are no open source drivers for any of these cards working yet. The Telemann "independent developer" project for HiPix requires an NDA to get source access. Teralogic who makes the chip on that board has been bought by Oak, BTW.

It's a fairly simple thing to remove region encoding on modern DVD-ROM "RPC2" drives. This site has firmware for practically every DVD-ROM drive available, patched to RPC1, which does not check for region encoding on the DVD. Couple this with a software DVD player such as InterVideo WinDVD and it's a simple matter to go into the registry and delete the key that tells the player how many times you can change the region encoding. You can even use this tool to do it automatically. I'm not positive about the legality of this, for IANAL, but I don't believe after recent rulings on DeCSS (which this does not bypass) that there is much of a risk of any kind of legal problem.

No. I never found any compelling reason to load a clunkier looking GUI, slow most of my applications down by 5-10% and possibly break others, not to mention driver issues. I also still use Media Player 6.4 (or ZoomPlayer), for the same reasons (newer versions are uglier and slower).

Save your wallet and use DVD Genie instead.

The firmware page has firmware for various DVD-ROMs to remove region encoding. Check out inmatrix for more information about firmware patches.

Without taking any part in the debate of browser integration, I feel that it is an absolute necessity to speak out the facts about the Windows Media Player.

Basically, Media Player will play back any audio / video format for which a DirectShow filter is available. The API is completely published; anybody can go out and write their own DirectShow filter for any new audio / video format that (s)he might develop. It is also completely open in the other direction; anybody can go out and write their own media player that can take the full advantage of all the DirectShow filters installed on the system. Good examples are Zoom Player (good for crappy TV-out chips like in some Geforce2 MX cards), TMPGEnc (can read in any video format that is supported and write out MPEG-1 or 2) and AVISynth (virtualizes any DirectShow-supported video format into .avi that all video editing programs understand).

Additionally, Media Player 6.4 is the absolutely best media player program that there can be. It's light weight, fast, simple, easy to use and doesn't have any advertisements. It can also retrieve newly supported codecs automatically from a server in the Internet, although this feature hasn't been used much. Compared to RealPlayer and Quicktime Player, the superiority is obvious.

It looks more like Apple and Real are pissed off because they would lose precious advertising and branding revenues if any media player program could play back their files. As previously noted, *anybody* can write their own DirectShow filter so Apple and Real definitely have the technical abilities to make those, but don't want to do so. Of course, it would mean that anybody could use the DirectShow filters to re-encode the content from their proprietary formats to some open format like MPEG-1 or 2, and reduce Real's and Apple's exclusivity value. It would also mean that people wouldn't be limited to their crappy, ad- and spyware-ridden media player programs.

Incidentally, DivX was supported in Linux originally thanks to the DirectShow filters being available. It was relatively easy to hook them up to a media player in a completely different OS, even if the source code wasn't available. Not very surprisingly, neither the Realvideo/audio codecs nor the most common Quicktime codecs are supported in for example mplayer.

In other words, would you REALLY want to see the standard Media Player removed from Windows and have it replaced with RealPlayer and Quicktime Player that don't play half of the formats that Media Player does, and are slow, sluggish, difficult to use and filled with advertisements and spyware, and are basically dead-ends when it comes to video formats and video processing? I wouldn't.

You sound somewhat like I did 3 years ago... At that point, there was good reason to dislike MS. Win98 had finally begun replacing Win95b, and while it was much better... it still sucked. We used to have competitions in the dorm as to how long a person could keep AIM connected (as both AIM and Windows were flaky). The longest ended up being over a month, mainly because the person left their machine on over break. Anytime you did any sort of multi-tasking, your computer would crash badly.

Win98SE fixed many of those problems. Fullscreen games ran properly, and you could actually break out of them, do something small, and go back into the game without any errors being thrown. So, reasons to dislike MS subsided somewhat...

At about the same time, our core CS classes switched to MS Visual Studio, since it had a complete version of STL implemented (I believe one of our profs did some extensive research in STL, and templating in general, so he wanted to teach using it). As a side note, here, I like STL as a teaching tool, and as a programming aide... Not wonderfully optimized yet, but still good. Anyway, the switch from the former UNIX-centric (AIX, I think) CS program to MS was odd, but turned out well enough...

The UNIX servers are still in place, and the CS servers are all runnning various BSD and Linux distros, so those professors who wanted to teach in the older style (or in non-MS languages) had the opportunity to do so. Those who wanted to tap in to MFC and STL could do so. After the first 2 years, I don't think I've had a language dictated to me by a professor. We're told to get the project running, use whatever we want (normally... on occasion, we'll be restricted to 3 or 4 languages so the TAs can be able to help if we have trouble).

So... All of that as background, freshman year I wanted to get away from MS as much as possible. It simply wasn't a decent work platform, but I didn't have much choice as the core classes were Visual Studio. I got used to the inconsitsencies of MSVC++ and did what I needed to pass... And I learned Perl and Java on the side.

Everything I learned about MS made me dislike it a bit more. Various attidues regarding Open-Source, predatory market practices, ridiculous naming conventions, buggy software. Trying to write code for windows was painful without the pre-generated code chunks from the wizards... and the wizard code was nearly impossible to read effectively (at the time).

As time went on, I learned a lot more about the whys of MS' practices, and I began to care less about it. The naming notation makes sense (eventually), the bugs have slowly been worked out... and in the end they produce good software. I suppose if I ever had to pay for it, I might think less of it... but the academic liscenses available through the school computer store make it cheap enough to be worth using.

That opinion might not have changed as much except for one release... Win2k. By this time I'd started getting Linux functioning on my computer, but I hadn't really had time to hack it or tweak it much... I still played too many games to make it a dedicated Linux box, and I didn't have the funding to get a second machine. About this time I was ready for my semi-annual Windows reformat and reload... So I figured I'd try the new version, and I ended up removing Linux entirely shortly thereafter. I think I've had Win2k crash once, mainly because I was tinkering in bad ways with DirectX and other things... Other than that, my (now 4 years old) machine has run perfectly well on Win2k with no problems.

I'm not going to defend any other MS OS, mainly from lack of interest in switching. XP sounded good, but I haven't heard the best things about it from other programmers (non-programmers seem to like it just fine). ME frankly sucked.

In the end, I use Visual C++ as my IDE for when I do C++, Eclipse for my Java and a generic text-editor for perl. I know several other languages, but generally don't bother using them. And so... I'd be perfectly happy coding in an MS environment or out. And, in fact, I wouldn't mind working for MS itself, albeit, in a game developer position rather than Apps.

To summarize my rambling... Frosh year, I ended up not liking MS. By around Junior, I realized that it really wasn't all that bad (from a CS standpoint). The legacy code support and addition of requested 'features' lends itself to bloated code. At the end of senior year, I'd be happy to work with MS, or without it. It really doesn't make a difference.

And, in more direct response to a few things...

Media player runs fine for me, though I generally use Zoom Player and Playa (for Divx) due to the additional features in them...

Product Activation is a stupid idea, IMHO, but... The price may not have gone down, but it also didn't go up.

I'm still running the same machine I entered college with using MS products, so I'm not feeling your pain in regards to needing the latest hardware to get reasonable speed.

If your machine requires a full minute for Word to load, then you have something very badly configured (Linux can take a half-hour to load, if you don't configure it right). Word loads in a few seconds for me, and I'm on a 400 Mhz, 128 MB RAM machine... Your inability to tweak Windows is not MS' fault.

The disc, like most BBC DVDs, will probably be dual region 2 and 4; so the Australians will be able to see it.

Different companies have different rights areas; the BBC will want to release a R1 version for NTSCers out there, but it's not such a high priority for a company which is resoundingly Region 2. Also, BBC discs are released by Fox in the States, who won't want their area treaded upon. Complain to them.

Maybe also the rights to HHGTTG are owned by someone else; "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and "The Avengers" are owned by A&E, for example.

Now you get all the problems we have every time something cool is released in the States that we can't get; e.g. "Almost Famous" bootleg cut, Monty Python series box sets, Criterion "Life of Brian" and so on. That's why a lot of British people (including me, and most of uk.media.dvd) have their players modded. You should too, even if it's just a DVD-ROM drive and DVD player software (or a H+ hardware card.) Enjoy a whole new world!

For the software side of things, I use DVD Genie, which works with a number of different players, including WinDVD.

However, you also need to have a DVD-ROM drive that is region-agnostic. You can check this with DVD Genie, one of the tabs in the program allows for this. If the drive is RPC-1(Region Protection Control, I think), your drive doesn't care what region encoding the disc has, and all you need is DVD Genie. Most drives are RPC-2, though, meaning that it will allow for a certain number of discs from different regions to be played before it "locks" on the final one, usually the fifth switch. Many can be changed to RPC-1 by installing different firmware(I did this with the drives on both my desktop and my notebook.). The best place I know to find region-free firmware is The Firmware Page.

Good luck to you.

For Windows, DVD Genie is the answer for most software solutions, including the popular WinDVD, and PowerDVD, and Remote Selector does the same for the Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus (aka VideoLogic DVD Player), and Creative's DXR2/3 amongst other hardware decoders.

I've used both with great results playing Region 1 disks on my (theoretically) Region 2 PCs.

• DVD EEPROM modifier
• DVD Genie
• ...

The DVD Infomatrix FAQ has a page that describes this kind of scripting and how to defeat it: http://faq.inmatrix.com/faq_entry0025.html.

There are firmware hacks to remove this on a whole lotta drives (I did on my Creative DVD-ROM I bought in January).

If you've got a Windows PC I'd also recommend a program called DVD Genie that lets you mess around with all the software dvd settings you've got (and unlocks some features in dvd playback programs).

I also have an Apex where you can select the region- quite handy...

iluvpr0n.

There's apparently a workaround, but in my case I just played it on my laptop, which connected to the TV via S-VHS connection, and found the results just as good.
--
Paul Gillingwater

(I took the liberty of cleaning up the spelling, and other nits ... :).

I guess that would be amusing, wearing computers with "touch" connectivity, then forming a human chain around an inner circle of cubicles around Christmas, singing, "O! Holy Quake, Nailgun Blight" while the wireless components shake Aibo robots about the office flashing their eyes red and green. (Can they do that? Would these folks have any input on this question?)

If anyone does this, please do make an MPEG2/4 of that and post an URL to it on Slashdot! I'd like to see that! 8^]

2. If so, they'll have to go after a lot of DVD manufacturers, including Sony, Hitachi, Panasonic, for leaving secret codes to unlock their players.

3. I don't believe a court would allow DMCA to sanction price fixing, in this case.
(if you want me to be obedient and don't temper with region locks, first sell your friggin discs at the same price worldwide)

4. DVDCCA's strongest arguments for the DeCSS case surround piracy, not DCMA violation. Region coding has absolutely nothing to do with piracy (yes, some pirates use DeCSS, admit it), and they know that.

5. Finally, to have it protected, there has to be an international law because region coding is by definition an international thing - only enforcing it in the US is a waste of effort.
Fortunately, DMCA is not international (yet).

Most DVD player software for windows requires that the video card is able to macrovision it's tv output(composite/s-video) before it will play to the tv out. Of course there are hacks for this, DVD Genie comes to mind, but this won't work out of the box...You could also use an exteranl scan converter(VGA->S-VHS/Composite) box, but the quality would sureley suffer...The dvd anywhere might work though, considering that IIRC macrovison works by supressing sync pulses or putting them out at the wrong intervals, the Composite->RF->Air->RF->Composite conversion might cause those sync pulses to be regenerated, i'm not sure on that though...anyway, with the Apex AD600 able to turn off macrovison and reigions for $160, this playstation 2 thing is no big deal