Bah! I can't hear my DVDs on my PC!!

Ever since I upgraded my PC and installed PowerDVD5.0 I never really put on a DVD to test it. However, yesterday and today I decided to watch one. The DVD started playing fine. I get video, I have no problems with that, but the audio was non-existant. There wasn't any audio. I check my audio cables that goes from the DVD RW drive to the onboard sound and that was ok. Today, I installed my old SB Live! sound card and when I set that all up I went to play the DVD (another DVD movie) and the previews played and I heard the audio fine! However, when I started to play the movie from the menu that same problem cropped up again. I am getting no audio.

I tried installing a trial version of PowerDVD7.0 and I still get the video but still no audio.

I'm definitely sure it is a software issue because the hardware checks out A-OK.

Could anyone tell me if this is some sort of copy-right protection? Because I tried it on an old DVD without any encryption and it worked fine. Could it be the player software? I do have DVD Decrypter installed but I doubt that could be affecting the DVD playback.

Any ideas?

 

Check to make sure that the movie/player is not trying to play in a format that your computer cannot handle (i.e. DTS). That would explain why you are able to hear the previews (probably in stereo/Pro Logic) but not the movie (probably 5.1 DD or DTS).

 

Where do i go to configure that?

 

Not a clue, it all depends on the software and drivers.

 

Sometimes the movie will default to surround sound. Check on the options on the disc menu, usually there are different sound options there.

 

I'm fairly certain that PowerDVD will handle almost any DVD audio format, but if that were the problem you might try going to the setup menu in the DVD's main menu (alternatively there's probably somewhere in the PowerDVD interface that lets you change audio tracks too) and if it has several audio tracks, try different ones and see if they all suffer from the same problem.

 

I was referring more to formats that the hardware cannot handle. For instance, having the software try to play DTS surround sound through only two speakers or trying to use a digital/optical output that isn't connected to anything.

 

To be able to hear various forms of DTS and SRS you need an additional expansion for your PowerDVD. I had the same problem with DTS DVDs. Here's the info and prices.

http://www.cyberlink.com/english/products/powerdvd/7/packs.jsp

 

You shouldn't need that cable. Remove it, might sort out the problem.

 

Do you have a digital out on your sound card?

Is it connected to anything?

If the DVD player is defaulting to the digital out but it's not connected to speakers, you won't get any sound in the movie.

-hl718

 

Here's the kicker. When I put in another DVD today, I get no audio whatsoever. SO basically, after installing the sound card, setting up the PC and Power DVD, the audio played in the previews before i got to the menu. But then when i did get to the menu, I got no audio! Now I get no audio at all. I'm going to try a differnt DVD player software later today to see if it is Power DVD or something with my hardware.

 

is it an iso you downloaded from the net ? sometimes they rip tracks you know.

 

Try VLC media player and see what happens.

 

VLC also doesn't give me audio.

 

You don't have it muted do you? :lol:

The only other setting I can think of that you might want to look at is the digital audio playback setting for the drive in device manager.

 

Its software. I'm not going to bother with PowerDVD though. Not going to pay for something that likes collecting information from my PC..

 

PowerDVD is pretty much *the* solution when it comes to software DVD players. If you want the best, that's it.

-hl718

 

Yeh. I'm going to get an older copy from work though and see if that will get it up and running.

 

Try klmcodecpack, it has a dvd decoder on it, but I believe it just might an included dll of PowerDvd itself.

 

Got it working by using a new copy of PowerDVD my friend gave to me.