A freind in Phuket sends me DVDs of his scuba diving trips but none of them work on my computer. They play fine in a normal DVD player hooked to my TV set but for some reason not in the CD-Rom / DVD player on my computer. Anyone know what the likely problem is?

He records with his HDD camcorder. Then offloads and records directly onto a DVD-R Princo CD 16X speed via his DVD recording player hooked to his TV.

Any shops in BKK that can convert the DVDs I got from him to make them also computer useable?

Sounds like they haven't been finalised properly while burning. Common problem with cheap discs. If this is the case, they won't be readable by any computer, despite being playable in a standalone. Ask your friend if he's noticed any such problems at the end of the 'writing' process, if so, switching to better quality media will solve this issue.

Nope. Friend noticed no problems.

Anyone know of any shops in Bangkok that are capable of reconverting the CD to make it computer readable?

Edited April 15, 200917 yr by Flow

It would be my guess that your problem is that you don't have the proper codec installed to play a video, just having Microsoft media player won't do it for video

Have you tried regular DVDs on your PC? Do they play?

Do you get an error message? What does it say?

As jcgodber notes you'll need the correct mpeg2 codecs installed (same as regular DVDs).

Edited April 15, 200917 yr by Crossy

My intention is not to start a thread about CD/DVD brand but it might have something to do with the brand your friend used

DVD-R Princo CD 16X

Install the free VLC media player and try if it plays your media