DVD Drivers

The Digital Video Disc Drive (DVD) first started appearing in computers around 1995. DVD’s are well known as a storage medium for 720p video content. If you purchase a computer today it is probably going to contain a DVD drive. Until recently most DVD drives came with custom DVD drivers. For many years there were trade wars between the various DVD formats that resulted in each DVD drive needing a custom driver that had to be installed on the computer before the drive was recognizable.

Starting with Microsoft Vista and continuing with Microsoft Windows Seven virtually every DVD driver format commonly used is included as a standard driver within the operating system. Occasionally you will encounter an off brand DVD drive that will not work until you install a custom DVD driver in your operating system. DVD drivers are one of many kernel level drivers that are highly protected from intentional and unintentional influence by built in protections that keep your computer running in a stable manner. Sometimes a ghost in the machine will manage to corrupt a DVD driver and can cause some rather strange errors.

Common DVD Drivers Problems

You are probably never going to have trouble with your DVD drivers unless you install a new DVD drive or something nasty happens to your operating system. Problems can and do occur and it is easy to identify when your DVD driver has issues.

Some of the most common DVD drivers are:

1. Inability to access your DVD drive.

2. Inability to write data or read data from your DVD drive.

3. Failure by the operating system to recognize your DVD drive.

4. Scrambled or jerky playback when viewing video through your DVD drive.

5. No sound when viewing video from your DVD drive.

The most common error you will encounter with DVD drivers is failure of your operating system to recognize the DVD drive. This type of error is very rare but does occur occasionally when kernel level software conflicts with the DVD driver. The next most common error you will encounter related to DVD driver failure is scrambled or jerky playback when viewing your video through your DVD drive.

Troubleshooting DVD Drivers

Troubleshooting your DVD drivers can be quite difficult if you are an end-user with little computer experience. If you are still using your DVD drive that came with the operating system you can try to download the latest version of your DVD drive’s driver and install it. Installing the latest version of your DVD drive’s driver should correct any problems you are having with the drive. If installing the latest driver does not help then you can try restoring your operating system to a point when you know the drive worked using system restore on Microsoft OS’s and other restore point programs for other OS’s.

If the above two solutions fail to correct your problem you might need to reinstall your operating system and see if the drive works with factory settings. If this solution does not work then your DVD drivers are probably fine and the DVD drive itself is at fault.