No audio output from my DVD

[garyb]

I finished building and testing my new super PC the first week of this month. Everything worked correctly and I was very pleased. Then I tried to play an instructional DVD and I found that there was video output but no audio output. I tried this same DVD on my old desktop and it worked correctly – there were both audio and video outputs. All the other audio outputs work correctly on my new PC, just not from my DVD.

At this point I don’t really know if I have a hardware problem or a configuration problem. There are only two connections to the DVD drive, those being the power and the SATA cable. I’m not aware of any other special audio connection from the drive. Following is the pertinent hardware & OS setup:

Motherboard = GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD4P
CD/DVD = Sony 24x DVD RW, AD-7240S-0B
Video card = EVGA GeForce GTX260 Core 216 896MB DDR3 PCI-Express 2.0
OS = Windows 7 home premium 64-bit builders pack

Can someone please give me some ideas as to how to pursue this problem?

[The Wise Monkey]

Can you play other DVDs on your PC?

[garyb]

Upon further research, I read a comment on the Sony support site that suggested that I might need a DVD program like Power DVD. It just so happens that I have that program on my old desktop, so I installed it on my new PC. Now everything works fine. There were no messages or anything else that indicated that Power DVD was involved in any way, but the sound works fine now, so I am happy. I hope this information can help someone else on this board.

[The Wise Monkey]

Yes, Windows doesn't provide any DVD playback support by default, unfortunately.

If anyone else has this problem, you can also use VLC media player, which is a free, open-source alternative.

[garyb]

Thanks for your feedback Wise Monkey. Unfortunately, I didn't try other DVDs before installing Power DVD, so I can't answer that question without uninstalling Power DVD. The thing that most surprised me was that Media Player played the video part just fine and didn't indicate any problems. On my XP machine, if Media Player couldn't play something, it would normally say that something (like a codec) was missing.