My PC won't play DVDs.

[Keria]

About a year ago the graphics card on my PC died. The people who replaced it reformatted the PC at the same time with Windows XP. It came back with no windows media player or, well, anything except the basic shit that comes with a 5 year old install.

I downloaded VLC media player which is supposed to come with a DVD decoder, the PC also has nero player on it. Both these programs tell me there is no disc in the DVD drive, which happened with several different DVDs. I think the problem is that the drivers for my DVD drive didn't get reinstalled, but I have no idea how to confirm this or fix it. Halp plz!

[Cephius]

First question, and no insult intended, but make sure this is a DVD drive and not just CD.

Next.. is the drive recognized at all? When you power on the computer, does the activity light on the drive flash at all? Within the operating system, is the drive listed on the device manager and disk management screen?

Normally, DVD drives do not require 3rd party drivers. Are you running XP SP2 or SP3?

If the drive light does not flash and it is not listed in the operating system, open up your case and check to see if the cables were not dislodged when the video card was installed.

[Isiolia]

The component that is usually missing without additional software is DVD playback software (decryption, MPEG-2 decoder). Most DVD software (even demo software) will install this missing component so that you can use Media Player n' such to play DVDs. VLC doesn't, though it can play them itself (and a host of other formats).

In that case though, you would be able to see that there's a disc there, you'd be able to look at the files on it, just wouldn't be able to play it.
If you're not able to see the disc at all, then you have issues outside of DVD decoding. Normally you shouldn't have to do anything special to get that to come up.

[Keria]

Got VLC to work after downloading some more codecs... seems my 6 year old DVD drive is just being a temperamental lil bitch. Thanks for the help though :D