[stabn]

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If it's too technical don't feel you have to respond, but what ARE all these things? My computer played movies just fine before I even bought the DVD player. ?? Now all of a sudden I need all this software to play a movie just because it's on a DVD? I guess that's it, but it seems way more complicated than it has to be.

Again, I don't have a problem paying for anything. I'm not looking to pirate or do anything illegal. I just want the simplest way to play a friggin movie. Aaaghh! This WinDVD came with all kinds of other stuff that I don't even know what's for. There's a google search bar on my desktop and in my task bar now. I really don't want those there. I have no problem just going to the google website if I need to look something up.

As you can see, I'm really computer illiterate.

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Basically DVD's are encrypted and the format they are encrypted in is a little 40 bit proprietary sceme. The drive you bought can read a DVD but does not have a hardware decoder (to unecrypt the datastream). So you buy a program that is licensed by the owners of the DVD-CCA encryption sceme to unencode the data. (Going to lunch i'll finish this post later along w/ instructions on how to install WinDVD w/o all that extra [censored]).

Going on to WinDVD:

Wow this installer has no custom setup option, that's pretty bs. It does however have the option screen near the end of setup with two check boxes. They say Google Toolbar and Google Desktop Search. If you had unchecked them during setup they wouldn't be installed. Same with InterActual on the following screen. A decent rule of them is to always uncheck options for 3rd party programs or non required options (like subscribing you to mailing lists) with installing things like dvd players/codecs/real player. Now that you've installed those options if you want you can go to

Start | Run | appwiz.cpl
On the Change or remove Programs tab find InterVideo WinDVD 7 and click remove. Follow the options to completely remove it. Then it is your choice to either reinstall it unselecting the checkboxes mentioned above or try another dvd player.

Let me know if you need any additional help / information.