Sony WinDVD BD for Vaio

[steve68]

Hi there,I received a bluray disc for Christmas. I tried to play it on my laptop but WinDVD would not recognise the disk (the optical drive just keeps whirring). I got an update from the Sony web site which I downloaded and installed. So I have WinDVD version 8.8.0.282.525371 ( for VAIO ) now installed. The optical drive still wont recognise the disk. I also have a further problem, in that the previous version (Intervideo WinDVD BD for Vaio v8.0) is still installed on my system and I cant do anything to remove it. I tried to uninstall it from the control panel and it says that the program uninstalled successfully, but the files are still in the Program Files folder and the program menu still contains a reference to the old version. I am using Windows Vista SP2. Please could any one help? Thank you.

[Ken Berry]

Can you confirm that the optical drive is a Blu-Ray drive and not just a DVD drive? The latter will not, of course, recognise a Blu-Ray disc.

[steve68]

The drive appears as BD-ROM f: in my computer.

[Ken Berry]

I don't really know anything about WinDVD, having given it up around version 8 (coincidentally), so hopefully someone with more hands-on experience will jump in here.

Failing that, I would suspect that BD copyright technology has moved on a lot since version 8, and that version is probably just not capable of reading the new copyright technologies on recent BD discs. If you read some of the other posts in this WinDVD forum, you will see that people with more up to date versions are even having this sort of trouble.

You might want to consider installing the latest version of WinDVD though I don't think version 8 would qualify you for the upgrade price. And I also have to confess that I don't know if WinDVD is like some of the other Corel products (like Video Studio or PaintShop Pro) where two or more versions can sit side by side on the same computer.

Or you could download and try freeware products such as VLC player which will certainly play BD discs -- at least on my set-up.

[steve68]

OK Thanks, Do you know how I can delete my old versions of WinDVD because as I said earlier the uninstall in programs and features is not working.

[Ken Berry]

If the previous uninstall process said the program had been uninstalled, then I personally would delete the program files, sure...

[steve68]

Any removal tools available? Thanks.