DVD Daze

At the request of the Montreal Worldcon bid, Tourisme Montreal sent me a DVD with a 3 1/2-minute promotional video. I had the idea of throwing it up on the screen in the suite we'll be using for our party at Westercon, using the DVD player in one of my two laptop computers for that purpose. The DVD arrived today, and I tried playing it.

At first it wouldn't play at all, but that was because I didn't have the PowerDVD software that came with the two Dell Inspiron 600m laptops installed. After installing it, the DVD would play. But when I checked the "repeat" setting in Windows Media Player, the DVD won't repeat.

It's not that the DVD is protected from repeating in all cases. I tried playing it in the standalone DVD player in the apartment, turning on repeat, and it's merrily repeating away in the living room as I type this. But I can't get it to repeat on the computers.

This is highly annoying. I don't want to have to haul my DVD player along to Westercon, but I also don't want to have to keep hitting play every 3 1/2 minutes on one of the laptops; that's just silly.

I suppose it might be something wrong with PowerDVD software supplied with the computers. I note that PowerDVD is now two versions later than the OEM version 5.1 that came with these two Dells. But I hate spending money on software without knowing whether that's the problem or not.

DVD Less Dazed

Thanks to a suggestion from solarbird, I wrote to Tourisme Montreal and asked if they had the promotional video in a form I could download from their web site. They pointed me at the file. (I'd point to it, but from the address, I am not sure it's meant to be publicly available.) After a bit of fiddling around, I was able to figure out how to save the video to my machine locally. (It wasn't as simple as right-clicking the video.) Then I played that file, and lo and behold, it will repeat without further intervention by me. Assuming we can get it working with the screens in the suite, this should work, and add some needed color to the room.

kproche, it looks like we won't need the portable DVD player after all.

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.