The joys of Windows 8 Part 1023...

...as my dad found today, Windows 8 doesn't have the ability to play DVD's.

It appears none of the Store apps do either...

Fortunately Cyberlink do a free trial - and it works fine...

Or just use VLC, which is all round brilliant.

You can buy the Windows 8 Media Centre Pack for £6.99 if you want it (they did give this away free in the very early days as a special offer).

Believe it has to do with the fact that MS have to pay licenses for every copy for the codecs. It has come in and out of windows over the years - a number of versions you had to buy 3rd party products to do DVD playback.

I thought it was due to so-called "piracy"...

VLC.....

In reply to a post by MrTAToad2:

I thought it was due to so-called "piracy"...

no as ian72 said, its a move microsoft made to save money.

In XP, vista and win7 the dvd codecs were preinstalled, but because of that microsoft had to pay for a licence for every cop of windows sold. Now they dont because the media pack isnt included by default.

Yes, its not bad.