Posted May 05, 2010
cogadh: You seem to forget, Windows does not include DVD playback support at all. You also need something like PowerDVD in order for your DVD drive to work.
Miaghstir: Funny, Microsoft's own media player seem to work well for me. This is a retail Win7 Ultimate, on a build-my-own PC, and I sure don't have any extra DVD player software installed. I'm pretty sure it worked equally well on Vista, though I cannot say for sure as I cannot test it at the moment and have used 7 since fall. XP was cumbersome though, needing an extra codec installed. If they changed that on Win 7, I was not aware of it, but I can say for certain that at least up to Vista, you still needed a third party codec to play DVDs:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/dvdcodecs.aspx