MediaDirect no longer recognizes DVD Drive

Hello I need some troubleshooting advice regarding issues with my Dell MediaDirect 4.0. I have a Studio 15 laptop with Vista.

My issue is playing Blu-Ray Discs. I put the disc in, and the program automatically initiates. After a while though just as its doing the the loading green circle thing the program abruptly terminates. I have no idea why it does this. When I start the program back up manually and tell it to play the BD movie, it just says "Unable to detect a DVD or a DVD device on your computer."

I don't know what the issue is here because when I open up to see what drives are listed, I see the DVD drive right there displaying the name of the movie.

So I'm hoping someone on this forum can help me identify and solve this issue.

Thanks.

 

What blu-ray disc is it?

If it is a new one then you might have problems. Some newer blu-ray discs require firmware and/or software updates to play. As far as I know there hasn't been one of these for a while for MediaDirect 4; so although it does support the playback of blu-ray discs (assuming of course you have a blu-ray drive), it might not playback the very latest ones.

Do you have a copy of powerDVD or something similar that can play blu-ray discs in Windows? Try that and see if your drive can play it without a firmware update; that at least rules out the drive itself.

 

I don't have a copy of PowerDVD or anything like that. This blu-ray is the movie "State of Play" that I rented from netflix. I actually watched half of this movie on my computer but I stopped it because I didn't have time. The next time I put the movie in while windows was kind of coming out of sleep and it froze the computer. After doing a hard reboot (holding down the power button) I tried it again and it's been giving me problems since then.

So it's definitely not the disc or the player. I think some sort of setting in the system got screwed up somehow but I'm not sure.

 

Just to add more info for anyone who might be able to use it:

MediaDirect doesn't play standard def DVD's or BD-DVD. Windows media center plays regular DVD's just fine, but it lacks functionality to play blu-ray.

I've tried reinstalling MediaDirect and it hasn't made any difference. I've also removed the drive from the Device Manager and restarted and allowed windows to reinstall it...still no difference.

Then I tried to see if other players would fare better. I installed a trial of Cyberlink PowerDVD 9, but it gave me the same error.

HOWEVER, I tried the trial version of TotalMedia Theatre 3 by ArcSoft. It plays blu-ray just fine (though it switches off aero first, but MediaDirect used to do that too). This is just a trial version however and I'm not going to pay $90 something dollars to do something my computer should be doing already.

Any input would be much appreciated.

Thanks.