Most Windows computers come with DVD player of some sort for you to play back DVD movies. The popular software are WinDVD and PowerDVD. However, if you install the OS by yourself, you don’t have access to those DVD playback software. Most people would try to use Windows Media Player to play DVDs. This is a message you get when you play a DVD on your custom machine.

What can you do besides buying the commercial program like WinDVD or PowerDVD? If you don’t feel like paying for the player, you can try VLC Media Player. It’s free and one added bonus is that you can play DVDs of different region codes. Note that there is a delay when you use VLC player to play DVDs. The program might seem like frozen, but it’s not. Just wait for a few seconds before the player determines how to decode your DVDs.

I encountered some mkv files that play poorly under Mac OS X using VLC media player, the sound is OK though. The video codec is avc1. I tried to fix the problem by going to Preferences and change Video Output Module, but that didn’t help. The VLC player version is also the latest one, so update of the program is not possible.

Without a true solution, I did find out an alternative player under Mac OS X. It’s called MPlayer OSX Extended. For people familiar with Linux, MPlayer is no stranger. It is my favorite media player for Linux. Here is a screenshot showing the same scene under MPlayer OSX Extended.

My experience with MPlayer Extended is good. It supports more file formats than VLC player does. The subtitle supports is also better. As with other free open source software, it has some quirks though. And you cannot fast forward the video like you can on VLC.

Here is the link to the developer’s page. The link to download the player is currently down. Please try again later if you cannot download it.