Just bought a dvd drive for my computer and need help! (1 Viewer)

[Brian Price]

I just bought a dvd drive for my pc from Newegg. It is OEM and I have never dealt with a piece of hardware with no instructions, etc. I'm assuming I can just take the cables from my cd-rom drive that I am replacing and run them into the back of the dvdrom drive??? Also, do I need special software to watch my dvd's on it??? Thanks in advance.

Brian Price

 

[Neil Joseph]

I believe you can download interactual DVD software froma number of online sources. Do a search on Yahoo or Google.

 

[KyleS]

Assuming that your CD was a master on IDE2 and your DVD-ROM is set to master, then yes you could just swap the drives out. Same as if the CD was a slave you can just set the DVD as a slave and then swap them out.

You will need software to view DVD's on your computer such as WinDVD or Power DVD ($10) around online or free ones which can be downloaded though I havnt tried on of those before.

KyleS

 

[Francois Caron]

Kudos on simply replacing the CD-ROM drive with the DVD-ROM drive. DVD-ROM drives were designed to be easily swappable, requiring no special drivers to render them fully operational in any existing system.
In order to watch DVD movies, you will need two basic components:
- A front-end media player,
- MPEG-2 video and Dolby Digital audio DirectShow filters.
The front-end media player is the easiest component to obtain. In fact, the Windows Media Player qualifies as a front-end player. However, it's performance and user access is not as refined as I would like it to be. I much prefer the enormous flexibility of the free Zoom Player available at http://www.inmatrix.com/files/zoomplayer_download.shtml .
The filters however are another story. You can get free MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital filters at http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/do...ng_plugin.html , but the limited amount of time I tried them out showed them to be very inflexible with the Zoom Player.
It's a totally different story with the $15 InterVideo DVD XPack package available at http://www.intervideo.com . These filters work extremely well with the Zoom Player and deliver impressive video performance. The audio performance however seems to be buggy on my notebook; loud passages on some discs suddenly drop in volume as if there was some kind of AGC module active in the filters. I tried e-mailing InterVideo about this problem, but they never responded.
As for Cyberlink's PowerDVD offerings, I'll wait until they resolve their chroma upsampling error (a.k.a. "chroma bug") before I even consider their package. Varying volume levels are annoying at times, but I'm more intolerant of lackluster video performance than a few quirks with volume. After all, this thing ain't plugged into a home theatre system.
Hope this helps!

 

[Brad_V]

As said, you just need the software. I have PowerDVD and Interactual DVD player. I prefer using the Interactual, although PowerDVD gets the job done, too. Look on tucows.com . Maybe there's a good freebie on there to at least test things out with.