Windows 8 – No video playback:
With Microsoft’s latest release of Windows 8; video playback wasn’t something that you would expect to be missing. However this is the case, so even with all previous versions of Windows being able to play video, they somehow decided to leave out this basic functionality!
Microsoft’s justification to this is that tablets and phones obviously don’t come with DVD drives, and the cost of paying the codex licence with each copy of Windows 8 would have to be passed onto the consumers, which is another negative.
After taking a bit of heat on the Windows 8 release day, Microsoft did enable people who had Windows 8 to download their own software Windows Media Centre but that was until yesterday.
So what are people now going to do?
Well basically you have two options:
You can either accept the cost and purchase Windows Media Centre from Microsoft’s own App store, or option two; go to http://www.videolan.org download VLC player (which is free) and then watch all of your movies and videos through that.
Whichever method you use, you’ll probably want to make sure that the appropriate app is set up as the default for DVD playback and, perhaps for other file associations as well.
