# Wonky Windows Media Player



## Nimrod (Jun 8, 2010)

I have Windows 7. I used a program called DVD Shrink to put some of my DVDs on the hard drive. They worked fine in Windows Media Player for a while, then some wouldn't play. They said the DVD was for the wrong area and some just wouldn't play at all. 

I down loaded a different media player from Cnet and made it the default player and all my files work just fine. I recorded my own DVDs on my hard drive for backup which is perfectly legal. The DVD Shrink program could shrink the file size so I could make a copy of the movie onto a recordable DVD but I didn't have it shrink the file because I didn't want to lose quality and I don't intend to make copies of the movies.

Is Microsoft legislating morality now? What gives them the right to disable something I paid for?


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## MisterG (Jun 29, 2015)

Nimrod said:


> Is Microsoft legislating morality now? What gives them the right to disable something I paid for?


Short answer is yes.

DVD Shrink works well to rip the disks to the computer. There are open source apps out that can fix the issue of media player reading the files. Handbrake can re-encode the files to play in media player. Not to say you need to, because media player is limited anyway.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

I haven't worked with DVD Shrink for a long time but my recollection is that it was a lot of trouble.

I normally don't rip DVDs myself. Just about everything available on DVD is available for download as a torrent for free. Search at thepiratebay.se for what you want. Typically I download a film as an avi or mp4, which can be watched directly from the hard drive. If you wish to burn the film to a DVD then I use DVDFlick (it's free) to encode the film.


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## MisterG (Jun 29, 2015)

I would be cautious of downloading movies from pirate sites, because you never know when you will get caught. There is no issue doing the digital backups, as they are listed as legal under the copyright laws. 

Just gotta use what you are comfortable using. I have friends who received seace and desist letters from their ISPs for downloading movies and others never get caught. Just gotta use judgment imo.


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## tbpbft (Aug 25, 2012)

Apologies in advance for the length. If I recall, DVD shrink was discontinued 8 to 10 years ago, one of the things it did was to remove the country restrictions on DVD's, and that was what made it so controversial. Since then newer copyright protections have appeared that DVD shrink cannot get around. It rips the DVD to your hard drive with the copyright protection algorithm, and that is what Media Player is freaking out about.

Any version of DVD shrink newer than 3.2 will be infested with malware. Stax Rip is an alternative. Hope this helps


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