Can you help me play a dvd on my laptop?

[FenellaBestwick]

So I've connected an external drive, the dvd is in it & the drive is plugged into the laptop. I can go to 'this pc' and see the drive & if I click on it, I can see the movie is there but as separate audio & video files. How do I get it to play?

You need a media player such as VLC or windows media player for the dvd to play in. Open the dvd files in the media player app of your choosing and then there should be an option to play the dvd.

Ok, have found the media player. It says open files or open folder, which one do I want?

If I choose either of the above it doesn't load🤔

I use VCL. When I open it and click on the start arrow I get a drop down box saying Open Media. One on the options is Disc - click on that, selecting E drive if that's what you're using. It then plays the DVD I want (NCIS LA this evening, fact fans).

VCL is free and downloads quite quickly.

If you need to browse and choose the actual video file then you should have a folder named ‘VIDEO_TS’ and it should contain at least one file with the extension ‘.VOB’

If your explorer view hides the extensions then just look for the biggest file, and failing that just try to open each file one at a time

For a typical DVD video you would find one small VOB file (which would be the menu system) and one or more large VOB files
If there’s one large one then that is your film, if there are multiples then there are multiple videos or one ‘film’ is split across multiple files.

The other thing is that your media player cannot play DVDs or does not have the correct video ‘codec’ to decode the video file

There is a potential issue that the DVD is region locked to a different country region, but if that was the case you ought to get an error stating this