DVD's won't play in windows 2000

[kempodragon]

Several months ago, I upgraded to win2k along with my video card and motherboard and hard drive. Since then, no matter what I try, I haven't been able to play any of my dvd's. My DVD-ROM worked fine in win98 and still plays cd's with no problems. After elimating all the obvious causes, I am wondering if my DVD drive is too old. It is a Hitachi GD-2500 6x drive. In the system properties, win2k correctly identifies it as a dvd drive, but in the driver section, only the cdrom.sys, redbook.sys and storprop.dll are being used by it, not the udfs.sys which is needed to read dvd's.
My system specs are as follows:

DFI CA64TC with VIA 82C694T/82C686B AGP chipset
Pentium III 933 Mhz
ATI Radeon 8500 AIW DV with 64 Megs mem
512 Megs Ram
Western Digital 80 GB Hard Drive
Soundblaster PCI 128
Win2k sp2
Aforementioned DVD drive and HP 9100i CD-burner

ALL drivers are up to date, DMA is enabled, my DVD is the on the secondary IDE master control. Hitachi discontinued this model so there are no BIOS updates for it. I would really like to know if it is possible to get it working in win2k. Driveinfo confirms that it is non region protected (RPC1), so I can play any region DVD's. Otherwise, I fear I may have to get a new DVD drive.

[theReal]

Have you tried different Software DVD players?

[kempodragon]

I tried using WinDVD, but still can't play any dvd's. Some DVD's get as far as the FBI warning screen, while others just show a black screen. In all cases, I can't get the main menu. If I try to access the menus directly, the players all soon stop responding and I have to close with Task Manager and reboot as well. This problem has me totally stumped

[kempodragon]

Ok, after much searching and dumping my motherboard for other reasons, I bought a new MB and a new DVD drive in order to see if my old drive was dying. I got a Liteon 16x with PowerDVD player and still couldn't play my DVD's. However it gave me an error message that finally made some sense. It said "Unsupported file format" when it tried to play. I looked in the system files that were loaded and discovered that the udf.sys was disabled at startup. I can't find any way of enabling this file, Win2k's system management tool only lets me save the list of driver files as a report. Can anyone tell me how to get udf.sys file to boot up?

[jeremymacmull]

have u tried installing the ASPI layer on 2k and XP its not installed by default

Jeremy

[Ramirez]

Download this HotFix (http://download.microsoft.com/download/win2000platform/Patch/Q310510/NT5/EN-US/Q310510_W2K_SP3_X86_EN.exe) ,or get the full SP3 (http://download.microsoft.com/download/win2000platform/SP/SP3/NT5/EN-US/W2Ksp3.exe) for win2k.

[drebel]

Had similar probs in the past with DVD in WinDvd that were caused :

-1.an SPTI problem.Originally defined by DvdDecrypter that said something like "unable to initialise SPTI" when used as an option.Cause: a miniport driver by via messed up my system and was completely unable to uninstall it->clean win2000 installation only!Only WinDVD had that problem.Sonic Player was working fine(i think it uses another method for readind dvds,probably aspi)

-2.in some graphic cards ,enabling "hardware acceleration","color acceleration" along with "spdif out" is causing a lot of problems.Disabling accelerations might be a nice idea with systems >800 MGZ

-3.when uninstalling WinDVDPlatinum some shared .ocx and .dlls are proposed to be removed.DONT!You 'll end up having no dvd access...

-4.are there any accessable-playable vobs in your HD?If so,no prob with mpeg2 codecs; only DVD access is infected ...

regards,
george

[kempodragon]

@ jeremy: Checked ASPI and it wasn't installed. Used ForceASPI from the downloads section. udfs.sys still disabled.

@ ramirez: Installed SP3 afterwards, again the udfs.sys is disabled at startup.

It looks like I'll have to edit the registry to force the system file to be loaded. The problem is I don't know where exactly to do this. All my registry editing has been cleaning out old stuff that was missed in uninstalls. I'm leery of putting in a new key until I know exactly where to put it and what value to use. Is there a utility or something that will do this for me?

[BarryMurphy]

You could try the w2k repair routine. Boot from the CD, do not take the first option for repair, continue as though you are installing windows...when w2k setup sees your existing partition, it will ask if you want to repair it. Say 'Y' and it will reinstall the OS files leaving all your stuff intact. Be forewarned, you will need to reapply all service packs and hot fixes from windows update but it may solve your problem.

Good luck!

[kempodragon]

I managed to get udfs.sys enabled by using the recovery console. However, I still can't get my DVD drive to use it. Device manager shows only redbook.sys, cd-rom.sys, and storprop.dll as the drivers being used by my drive. I checked the registy, and found that the storprop.dll has the DVD drive profile loaded. It doesn't make any sense. I even ran the repair option from the Win2k CD, and still no luck. In the /inf folder, there isn't any .inf for a DVD drive, so I can't let Win2k update the drive that way. If I can't find out what registry key to edit, it looks like I'll have to do a complete format and reinstall and hope that will finally solve my problem. Clearly, something went wrong with the initial installation, even though I did a "clean" install, i.e. I didn't upgrade the Win98 files but installed Win2k fresh as Doom9 recommends.

[Ramirez]

I've done a little checking on my win2k machine and came across the following,Only redbook.sys, cd-rom.sys,and storprop.dll are Loaded for my LG-DVD Drive either, and the udf.sys startup mode is always disabled,so I guess you're facing the wrong direction here. I think your prob is more like a video driver fault,perhaps its Fails to deal with the Macrovision copy protection.Are you Catalist 3 drivers user?

[kempodragon]

I think the latest version on mine is catalyst 2. I'll update later this week and see what happens.

[kempodragon]

Moderators, please feel free to move this thread to an appropriate forum, since Ramirez confirmed that my DVD drive does have the correct drivers loaded. After reading his reply, I decided to step back and start over. First I confirmed the error messages in both the Ati DVD player and PowerDVD. ATI's error message is "This player does not match the region encoding on this disc.". PowerDVD error message is "Unknown file format" and an error code number

Next, I tried ripping the DVD. I had previously avoided ripping in part because I believed I had to be able to play my DVD's. DVD Decrypter wasn't able to detect my DVD-ROM with spti (btw, what is this anyway?). However, when I used wnaspi32, it detected my drive and the dvd in it perfectly. I then tried ripping, and decrypted the disc with no problems. DVD2AVI was able to open the decrypted vobs, but when I tried to play the vobs in PowerDVD, I again got the unknown file format error. I may have forgotten something, since I only ripped the main movie and the first audio stream. Macrovision protection was removed during the ripping process.

I then went through all of my driver files looking for anything to do with DVD's. I only found one file that actually has anything to do with DVD playback: atimiaaa.dll. This file's properties list it as Rage128 DVD Authentication. My question is: Could my playback problems be due to the players being unable to authenticate the DVD? If so, how do I determine this and how to I go about fixing it?