How do you Play a DVD under Windows 98

[Retro6]

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.

 

[Retro6]

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.

 

[Retro6]

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]

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.

 

[Retro6]

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.

 

[Retro6]

Nothing worked I tried all of them.

 

[Retro6]

Cool... thanks for that I'll give PowerDVD 5.1 a try I'll see if I can find the key for it as well. The two files might just fit on two 3.5 floppy disks

Back in the day I saw a computer that played DVD's and it looked very nice with a set of wooden harman kardon PC speakers that sounded amazing and I always wanted a PC like that but I could never afford one at the time, I think it was a Pentium II or III running Windows 98. Its nice when you can build that retro PC you always wanted from back in the early days.

I've got a pair of harman kardon speakers now to go with it and a Sound Blaster card all's I need is a CRT monitor.

There's nothing like watching a DVD on a CRT monitor on a retro computer running Windows 98 with a decent set of PC speakers. Although the retro build I did has a Intel Pentium 4 processor and motherboard that isn't period correct, you'd never know as it behaves like a top end Intel Pentium III computer. Everything else is period correct like the sound card and video card, etc etc.

I'll give that PowerDVD 5.1 a go and see how things go.

 

[Retro6]

@Retro6 If it would be any help, I can open this bad boy up and see what's what. I can upload the software somewhere. It's from that boxed, new Tiny PC that I picked up.

Thanks I'd really appreciate you doing that for me

I did try something similar but it said I needed an ATI DVD drive.

 

[Retro6]

That's interesting cos the PC this came with has the most generic looking DVD drive. POST identified it as Matsuio or something.

It could be something to do with the software I downloaded, maybe there was something missing from it.

I know with some old DVD player software it will have a list of several branded DVD drives that it supports.

 

[Retro6]

I did it. I found the software kinda by accident when I was looking for other software for my Windows 98 SE pack. Its pretty decent but I had to spend time looking for a product key to install the DVD software and it all worked. I can now watch DVDs in Win95/Win98/2000 brilliant.