How do you Play a DVD under Windows 98

Retro6 · 24 Feb 2019 at 13:16

I've been seeing if I can play a DVD in Windows 98 this is more for nostalgia reasons.

I need the software to play a DVD I tried VLC player and Windows Media Player 9 but none have the plugins for a DVD to play.

Is there a DVD player software I can download? I've been searching the web for one but I'm not familiar with any DVD players for Windows 98.

I'm using Windows 98 second edition.

Thanks.

Deleted member 77746 · 24 Feb 2019 at 13:47

KLite codec pack is what you might need to install

Nemiyen · 24 Feb 2019 at 14:11

This is when programs like Cyberlink Power Dvd were in their hayday. Nearly every dell pc shipped with a free trial copy of it! Along came media centre and codec packs and it's not needed pretty much any more.

MagicBoy · 24 Feb 2019 at 14:20

There was licensing fees for the codec so it wasn't bundled in. Most DVD-ROM drives and machines shipped with Cyberlink PowerDVD or Intervideo WinDVD. There's some rudimentary support for motion compensation hardware assisted decode if you've got a supported GPU (Rage Pro, Geforce 256 etc).

Nemiyen · 24 Feb 2019 at 14:24

Ah yeah WinDvd was the other one. Tried to remember it but it eluded me! I had powerdvd myself and probably still do in a box somewhere!!

Retro6 · 24 Feb 2019 at 18:21

It must have been a nightmare back then if you bought a DVD and DVD ROM Drive and only had your computer to rely on to play it, mind ya I'd imagine the DVD ROM Drive may of came with some software at the time.

I found quite a few but I had no success with any of them, they were all free trial versions that wanted me to register in order to use them. I would have thought that there would be an opensource DVD player available or that somebody would have wrote a program for playing DVD's under Windows 98. I have a dedicated ATI Rage 128 pro video card in the machine to play them and the processor is a Intel Pentium 4 at 2.8GHz with a bus speed of 533MHz so its got plenty power, its a custom build I did the other day inside a beige retro case I had.

Rroff · 24 Feb 2019 at 18:26

Truth is a lot of people depended on programs like AnyDVD and still today the whole thing is a mess of licensing issues and compatibility and one of the reasons a lot of people use streaming sites although sadly even there we are running into the same **** when it comes to 4K/UHD.

MagicBoy · 24 Feb 2019 at 18:31

Retro6 said:
It must have been a nightmare back then if you bought a DVD and DVD ROM Drive and only had your computer to rely on to play it, mind ya I'd imagine the DVD ROM Drive may of came with some software at the time.

That's pretty much what I said. My original Creative 2x drive, and a later Toshiba both came with software.

Very early days you needed a PCI decoder card as the CPUs weren't powerful enough, Creative DXR2 for example. Then the graphics card makers starting adding motion compensation and we got faster Pentium IIs.

For pure software decoding without dropped frames you were looking at 300MHz PII territory.

Retro6 · 25 Feb 2019 at 17:36

MagicBoy said:
That's pretty much what I said. My original Creative 2x drive, and a later Toshiba both came with software.

Very early days you needed a PCI decoder card as the CPUs weren't powerful enough, Creative DXR2 for example. Then the graphics card makers starting adding motion compensation and we got faster Pentium IIs.

For pure software decoding without dropped frames you were looking at 300MHz PII territory.

I remember back in early 2003 I tried to see if I could turn a CRT monitor in to an HD TV but trying to find a way of converting the VGA signal to AV was no easy task. Now there are VGA to AV converters and of course full HD TV's.

Retro6 · 25 Feb 2019 at 17:36

Rroff said:
Truth is a lot of people depended on programs like AnyDVD and still today the whole thing is a mess of licensing issues and compatibility and one of the reasons a lot of people use streaming sites although sadly even there we are running into the same **** when it comes to 4K/UHD.

It all comes down to corporation greed.

Deleted member 77746 · 25 Feb 2019 at 22:55

Retro6 said:
It must have been a nightmare back then if you bought a DVD and DVD ROM Drive and only had your computer to rely on to play it, mind ya I'd imagine the DVD ROM Drive may of came with some software at the time.

I found quite a few but I had no success with any of them, they were all free trial versions that wanted me to register in order to use them. I would have thought that there would be an opensource DVD player available or that somebody would have wrote a program for playing DVD's under Windows 98. I have a dedicated ATI Rage 128 pro video card in the machine to play them and the processor is a Intel Pentium 4 at 2.8GHz with a bus speed of 533MHz so its got plenty power, its a custom build I did the other day inside a beige retro case I had.

It wasn’t a nightmare because you just installed Klite application and everything “just played”.

Jamesyboyjim · 27 Feb 2019 at 15:21

I used to use Cyberlink Power DVD 4 back in the day to play DVD's on a win 98se PC. But this was before we had the internet and it came shipped with the PC.

skyripper · 27 Feb 2019 at 17:10

I remember my first DVDs were played using PowerDVD on a DVD drive I got second hand from work and an AMD card with a SVIDEO lead into a widescreen telly rented (yes rented!) from Rumbelows. It was a ropey hokey setup. DVDs were £15 or more I think.

I've just put a slot-loading bluray drive into my media center this year [I got a boxset for xmas that was cheaper than Netflix/Amazon etc], and it's still a ropey hokey setup in terms of software, even if the hookup to HD display, projector and the drivers has become so much easier these days. Was still painful converting a miniSATA to normal SATA mind you.

An xbox one or a bluray drive from Argos would be so much simpler sometimes...

Retro6 · 27 Feb 2019 at 18:38

At one of the places where I work they are getting rid of all their old computers and I know a couple have Bluray drives on them so I'm going to be cheeky and see if they can give me all there old computers many of them have some decent parts in them like video cards and decent hard drives and stuff, it might be that they would only give me a couple. There all Dual Core systems so still half decent in general.

I tried more DVD players under Windows 98 but still no joy even trying to convert a DVD file to AVI then trying it on Windows 98 but Windows 98 didn't recognize it. The experiment continues.

Deleted member 77746 · 28 Feb 2019 at 00:32

Have you installed klite codecs?

jellybeard999 · 4 Mar 2019 at 21:56

mrbell1984 said:
Have you installed klite codecs?

Klite codec pack was awful. It just created problems and conflicts in my experience.

You should be able to get away with mpchc and possibly ffdshow.

Iirc CCCP was the only decent codec pack - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Community_Codec_Pack

Deleted member 77746 · 5 Mar 2019 at 09:20

jellybeard999 said:
Klite codec pack was awful. It just created problems and conflicts in my experience.

You should be able to get away with mpchc and possibly ffdshow.

Iirc CCCP was the only decent codec pack - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Community_Codec_Pack

Once I installed kLight Codec pack on Win 98 every film played worked. I had no problems at all with it.

Retro6 · 5 Mar 2019 at 18:42

Nothing worked I tried all of them.

AthlonXP1800 · 5 Mar 2019 at 22:33

mrbell1984 said:
Once I installed kLight Codec pack on Win 98 every film played worked. I had no problems at all with it.

Tested KLCodec on Windows 98 SE on VMWare and VirtualBox did not worked. Tried latest KLCodec version did not supported Windows 98 SE, searched and found KLCodec 2.88f is the final version supported Windows 98 SE, enabled all codecs included MPEG2 did not worked with Media Player Classic and VLC 0.8.6 final version to supported Windows 98 SE.

AthlonXP1800 · 5 Mar 2019 at 22:48

Retro6 said:
Nothing worked I tried all of them.

Yeah nothing worked.

I also downloaded and installed PowerDVD 3, 4, 5 and 6, none of it worked on Windows 98 SE and Me. Tried run DirectX runtime to updated latest version still not worked.

So I found the original PowerDVD 1.5 is the only version worked on both Windows 98 SE and Me.

I had PowerDVD 1.5 installed on Windows 98 SE worked fine with Pioneer DVD-104S slot drive playback first DVD movie Lethal Weapon 4 back in 1998.

Found PowerDVD 1.5 Trial from old version website:

http://www.oldversion.com/windows/powerdvd-1-5

Found crack somewhere and inserted Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country DVD, playback worked fine on VMWare.

But didnt worked on VirtualBox because Windows 98 SE only able to used up to 16 colours while VMWare able to used either 256 and True Colour 32 bit colours.