Sorry if this question is asked all the time - if so then please ignore - but I have a DVD drive in my PC, and have recently been given three DVDs which I want to watch, but I don't have a hardware decoder card, so is there a free software decoder (as opposed to player software such as Nullsoft's Zoom Player, which does not come with a decoder) available on the net? I have tried WinDVD and PowerDVD, but they are limited to 5 minutes of playback unless you pay for them.

[Mark Hughes]

No, because of the licencing issues regarding the DVD decoding spec, a licence fee must be paid to the DVD consortuim who spent a lot of money developing the format in the first place, for each player sold that includes the decoding algorithms (hardware or software) - so it would mean a company losing a lot of money to give away a player free, as for every person that downloaded it they'd have to subsidise the payment to the DVD consortium.

So, I'm afraid, the answer is no.

Still, they're only about a tenner for the software DVD players, or were last time I checked.

Mark

[Orbitalzone]

DVD software doesn't cost much really.

Go and search a few places like scan.co.uk or dabs.com and you'll likely find a cheap deal

(scan were selling PowerDVD3 for £5 when purhcased with hardware admittedly

I read somewhere that the Windows media player 4 and 5 can have a registry tweak to make them play DVD. I think it was built into media player but never implemented, probably due to fees as Mark mentioned. Search google and you'll find millions of items about DVD software.

Finally, go to a computer fair, they sell OEM software cheap - no boxe or instructions but original software at low costs.