Vista laptop - no sound from DVDs

[Skyhooker]

I haven't been able to figure this one out, and I'd appreciate any suggestions. My cousin is visiting from Germany, and gets no sound when playing a DVD on his Fujitsu laptop running Vista Business edition. He says it's a recent change, but has made no changes to his system that he knows of, and has no idea what might've caused this. It plays audio CDs fine, so it's not the player itself, and plays DVD video with no problems, but not the audio. I've checked every sound setting I can find, and nothing is muted or has the volume turned down. One snag is that it's all in German, and while my conversational German is passable, my technical German is a bit spotty. Also, I'm fairly new to Vista, so I've been looking in all the places I would with an XP system, but maybe I'm missing something.

I only had a few minutes with the computer a couple days ago, but I'll see my cousin again today for a couple hours (his last day here), so I'll start with updating or reinstalling the sound drivers. I was just hoping to be well-armed with ideas because time is so short.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

[abe]

maybe its missing some audio codecs

[Skyhooker]

Originally Posted by abe

maybe its missing some audio codecs

Possibly, but only if they got corrupted or deleted. He says these same DVDs played fine earlier in his trip.

I'll also try a couple of different DVD-compatible media players when I see him.

[XFalloutX]

Originally Posted by Skyhooker

I'll also try a couple of different DVD-compatible media players when I see him.

I was going to sugest that. I was wondering if the program that was opening and playing the CD music was differnt from what was opening and playing the DVD. Its possible that the audio was muted within that program.

[Skyhooker]

Well, problem solved... sort of. The program set to open DVDs was Windows Media Player (of course), and we could find nothing to indicate that the sound was turned down or muted. Reinstalling audio drivers changed nothing, so I downloaded VLC Media Player, and that worked perfectly, so that is now set as the default DVD player.