please recommend movie codecs for XP/WMP11

[JohnnyBob]

I reinstalled my XP op system and Windows Media Player 11, and find that it won't play DVD movies. It needs codecs. Mostly I want to play movies from the usual .vob files in a video_ts folder on my hard drive, or from a DVD. I believe that's called MPEG2 format. That's my primary need.

Secondly, I might occasionally want to play movies with an .avi format, but that's not very important.

Mainly I want a simple free codec for WMP11 that won't interfere with my system's only other video codec which is CyberLink Video/SP Decoder, CLVSD.ax, 5.0.0.2226 which I use with PowerDVD5. I'm aware that some codecs can be problematical, interfering with other codecs and difficult to install/uninstall. So that's why I'm asking for a recommendation. In my former installation of XP I had a real mess of codecs and want to avoid that. I like to be neat!

I'm not interested in VLC player. I don't like it. But if its codecs would activate movies on WMP, then that might be a possibility. Actually I'm not very interested in WMP either, and use PowerDVD5 95%+ of the time, but since I need WMP on my computer anyway, I'd like to activate it for playing movies.

Thanks.

[redwudz]

Then you just need a MPEG-2 codec. You could try Dscaler MPEG Filters for just MPEG-2 decoding. Or use ffdshow, though it may want to add other codecs.

[JohnnyBob]

Problem solved!

Poking around and reading some old threads here, I discovered/remembered that I can "Send" the video_ts.ifo file to WMP11 and it plays the movie OK from a hard drive. I also made a shortcut for my desktop that works with DVDs [D:\VIDEO_TS\VIDEO_TS.IFO]. That's easy enough. So I guess I don't need any more codecs.

Thanks anyway...

[JohnnyBob]

P.S.
Playing around with it, there is about a 30 second delay before WMP11 begins to play the movie after sending it the video_ts.ifo file. I have no idea why the delay, but I'm not going to worry about it.