A friend of mine just sent me a DVD-R, which he presumably made with his European camcorder of his recent visit with us. It would not work in our DVD player, which I expected from the compatability issues that we have discussed before on this board. I put it into my PC and windows player recognizes the file, but gives me an error message to play it. Any ideas on what else I can do to play it? Tell me what other info. you may need.

Thanks!

Attempt to play this in a regular DVD Player ... non-DVD

You know, I tried that and it said disc failure. So I checked the region settings to make sure it said "region free". I put the disc back into the DVD player and it told me that it was a data file. I am not certain, but I think that the file was from a digital video player and was saved in windows media. Any other ideas? When I put it in my PC, it does recognize the file by telling me it is 1.2 gigs and the name of the file.

Will it work on the computer (sorry if this is way out there but I thought I would give it a shot).

My gosh, I just got it to work on the PC! Yipee!

Hey..thats great. The give away was when you said windows media....

I don't know what I did, but somehow it worked late last night. I am going to try to play it again tonight. It failed to play towards the end, saying that the disc was scratched or dirty. I will let you know. It was so worth it because what I did see was not just a home video but a really professionally made slide show of their visit with us, set to music from both Italy and America. They even had a written introduction that scrolled on the screen about the importance of our friendship, written in both Italian and English. I was really blown away.

Basically, what you have told us is that it was not saved AS a DVD, but ON a DVD ... the Windows Media File is a file that can be played by the computer ... not by the DVD software on the computer.

WOW Poipu!! How exciting. Lucky you! That was very nice of them. You may want to save the data on your hard drive and burn a new CD just to make sure nothing gets lost or corupted in the future.

Great idea, Cathy! I am keeping my fingers crossed that I will be able to get the thing to play again when I get home today. It was very "tempermental."