When customers play DVDs on computers w/o player

[Eric Pautsch]

You explain to them the situation and provide a link and instructions on what to do. I fact, I have a permanent disclaimer on my invoices that explains their responsibility in finding a suitable playback platform and this is not related to my authored discs. I even provide links to software playback apps. Before the invoice goes out, I explain this on the phone with them as well.

DVDs were designed to play on set top players…software playback came after the fact.

[Bob Cole]

[eric pautsch] “I have a permanent disclaimer on my invoices that explains their responsibility in finding a suitable playback platform”
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[Michael Sacci]

[Bob Cole] “but it doesn’t play correctly” what exactly is it not doing or doing. I do not accept vague statements like this, this in no way to can troubleshot, “not playing correctly”

WM Player can play DVDs if they download the right codecs and using a modern version (11?). But it is still a MS product and they handle things a little less straight forward. So if a project works in everything else and you have authored a clean DVD there is not much you can do.

It would be great if someone knew of specific things that WMP didn’t handle.

[Bob Cole]

[Michael Sacci] “but it doesn’t play correctly” what exactly is it not doing or doing. I do not accept vague statements like this, this in no way to can troubleshot, “not playing correctly””

I agree; when someone asks for help he/she should be as specific as possible. But that’s the best I can do right now; I’m hearing this from a very non-technical person who’s a coast away from me, and I thought the experts here might already be familiar with this situation. If/when I obtain a more detailed report I’ll provide it.

Thanks for the report about WMP. That makes life interesting. I will try to make sure we have enough time in the schedule to do testing before the label is printed, so we can provide a “compatible with” list for computer playback.

Bob c

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[Eric Pautsch]

A disclaimer would be good. Like Micheal said, there’s no possible way to control what happens once its delivered.

[Michael Sacci]

Bob, totally understand, and I was mostly meaning that the 1st thing I do is to require a client to give me full details of the problem, I do authoring for a replication place and a lot of times the end “client” goes through 3 levels before me. So I get “it has problems” a lot, a good bit of the time it is user errors but I refuse to try to solve a problem before I know exactly what it is.

But yes it is also important that you post as much info as you can also :-).

[Noah Kadner]

You could print instructions to download PowerDVD on the back. I mean you can buy an Apex DVD player for $20 so it’s ultimately their issue if they haven’t got a disc player. Surely if they want a DVD they must have found some way in the past to play one?

Noah

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