Media Player refuses to play VOB files on external disk

[lost in XP]

I am running Media Player 11.0.6002.18111 on a Vista system. I have some dvd
images in the form of VOB etc. files on an external usb disk. Until
yesterday I had no problem playing those videos on Media Player, but then
suddenly I started getting the error message "Windows Media Player cannot
play the DVD because the disc prohibits playback in your region of the
world..." When I copy the folder from the external disk to the C disk, the
video plays correctly. When I connect the external disk to another computer,
Media Player plays the file correctly.

I would appreciate any help to resolve this problem.

P.S.: No problems playing other file types, e.g. MPG.
Other media players have no problem playing the VOB files.
The problem is restricted to playing via Microsoft Media Player on this
computer VOB files located on an external disk.

 

[Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media]]

On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:45:01 -0800, lost in XP
<lostinXP@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>I am running Media Player 11.0.6002.18111 on a Vista system. I have some dvd
>images in the form of VOB etc. files on an external usb disk. Until
>yesterday I had no problem playing those videos on Media Player, but then
>suddenly I started getting the error message "Windows Media Player cannot
>play the DVD because the disc prohibits playback in your region of the
>world..." When I copy the folder from the external disk to the C disk, the
>video plays correctly. When I connect the external disk to another computer,
>Media Player plays the file correctly.
>
>I would appreciate any help to resolve this problem.
>
>P.S.: No problems playing other file types, e.g. MPG.
>Other media players have no problem playing the VOB files.
>The problem is restricted to playing via Microsoft Media Player on this
>computer VOB files located on an external disk.

I can't think of a reason that'd happen. The DVD disk is region coded,
and the DVD drive and OS work together to check the DVD disk region
conforms to the one which is expected for the DVD drive.

Are you sure you don't have a 'wrong region' DVD disk in the drive,
and it's actually reporting that as the issue, and not the VOB file
itself ?

That's the only thing I can think of which might cause that, as USB
disk should just contain a [windows, e.g. NTFS] filesystem - it has no
info about region codes which it'll deliver at all.

HTH
Cheers - Neil
------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2010
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs