How do you Play a DVD under Windows 98

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 :D

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.
 
I used to use a hardware MPEG2 decoder card. Mainly as it was so easy to set the region code, turn off macrovision, use a remote and so on as I needed.

Probably still got it somwwhere.
 
almoststew1990 said:
That's interesting cos the PC this came with has the most generic looking DVD drive. POST identified it as Matsuio or something.
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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.
 
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. :)
 
I know this is an old ghost of a thread. but i had an answer for thiis. i used to use DivX player back then to play DVD's, Avi's and MKV's.. Might try gettinghold of Divx Player, im sure you can get iit still, it was a free download back then.
 
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.
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DVD's are encrypted and you had to licence the software which meant free players didn't exist as there was a licence fee payable not to mention they didn't want the encryption system leaked. I remember when it was cracked it was a big deal and they did everything they could to ban the software. Its why they went hell for leather with blu-ray encryption. But open source players which did exist would not play movie disks, still can't actually unless you have some kind of decryption layer.
 
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