Vista - DRM issue playing a DVD?

Somebody please help! I recently began watching the Heroes DVD box set (original) on my computer and the first six episodes play perfectly. At the end of the seventh and whole of the eighth episode (halfway through Disc 3) the DVD stops reading and after a LONG wait an error message appears concerning DRM and that I should try to update my video driver.

I have Vista Home Basic with an Nvidia 8800GTX and the latest drivers are installed. I also have PowerDVD 6 but the disc struggles at the same point just like Media Player. Same problem on another computer with Vista Home Premium. However, the whole disc plays *perfectly* on an XP-based machine.

Is there any solution to this, it's most frustrating? Thanks.

Hi, XLS, and welcome to the forums.

It could be your DVD drive that is having issues - get a lens cleaner (made by Maxell, usually about $20 USD) and see if that makes a difference....

Hi, thank you for your suggestion but I'm fairly sure a dirty lens is not the problem. Part of the disc plays fine but the point at which it stops is the exact same point at which it stops on another Vista-based machine. XP-based machines play the whole thing.

The error message thrown up is "Windows Media Player cannot play this DVD because there is a problem with digital copy protection between your DVD drive, decoder, and video card. Try installing an updated driver for your video card."

But I can watch half of the disc without any problem! Any other suggestions would be welcome.

You can try updating the firmware in your DVD drive, updating the video drivers, and updating the monitor driver, and if all that fails it could be the codec so hopefully you can find one that works. Or just install VLC player or AnyDVD. Sometimes you have to take drastic action to play movies you legally purchased on hardware that it should legally run on.