External DVD Drive Problems

My cousin is having problems using an external DVD drive on his laptop.

The external DVD drive is a Samsung SE-218CB.
The cousin's laptop is a Samsung Chronos 7 NP780z5e-s01ub (from Best Buy). Has Windows 8 x64.


When he plugs the DVD drive in, and inserts a DVD movie, it can't seem to play them. Windows Media Player simply won't detect the disc, and VLC crashes when it attempts to open the disc. The DVD drive appears in My Computer and Device Manager, and the name of the movie (in this case Jack Reacher) also appears in My Computer when looking at the DVD drive.

When I put the DVD into my 16F3's BD drive, it detects and plays it just fine.
When I plug the external DVD drive to one of my 16F3's USB ports, it detects and plays just fine.

So right now it looks like a problem on the Samsung's end, but I don't know what to try. I'm also not familiar with Windows 8, but I don't think that could be a factor, right?

 

Not quite.

This proves the DVD itself is functioning.

This confirms there are no issues with the external drive itself.

If the external drive is reading the disc as a DVD and able to display it's disc name, then the drive is communicating as it should. But if it crashed during playback, that could very well be Windows 8. But I'm willing to bet the codec software, whether default or VLC, has gotten all screwed up.

My best recommendation is to download a free software like K-Lite or CCCP codec. Install them, set them to default for decoding, and then try playing in Windows Media Player again. If it works, it was the stock codecs. If it doesn't, its something within Windows 8 that's causing the crash.

 

I have a feeling the usb is not giving enough power?

Does it take one or two usb port?

 

I have a similar drive to yours (SE-208) and haven't encountered any problems with it. It doesn't help Windows 8 have no native DVD playback for Windows Media Player (cost saving measure for Microsoft) so I have a check with the codecs to make sure it hasn't been messed up. CCCP or K-Lite provide good codec packs as radji suggested, plus you could try using Media Player Classic as an alternative to VLC player to see if that works instead.

 

Did not know that about Win8. Good to know.

I'll try Media Player Classic and mix'n'match various filters and codecs until something works. (CCCP is just MPC plus LAV filters, for example).

My cousin isn't very techy so he might not have installed any playback codecs prior to this.

 

No, you need to replicate the same conditions are your cousin: connect the external drive to your system and see what happens. Change the disc and see what happens.

A disc can be faulty but better players/programs can handle the faults better. Nevertheless, I suspect this is an inferior software that's causing this problem.

 

I did the closest I could to replicating the conditions. I'm not going to install Win8 on my 16F3 just to test an external ODD.

 

Did you try downloading and installing the codec packs?

Your issue sounds remarkably similar to what I've encountered over the years. Windows doesn't provide native support for DVDs. As such, it can actually read the DVDs, but not play them. It doesn't want to do it and it will cause WMP to hand and most other 3rd party media players to crash unless some 3rd party codecs are installed.