Autoplay's hosed in XP

[Citizen Bleys]

Not sure when it happened, because I don't play DVDs often, but last time I played a DVD, I slid the bastard in the drive and PowerDVD popped up like it was supposed to--Yesterday and today, though, it opened an explorer window.

I went into the AutoPlay tab of my DVD drive and set every value (I.e., music files, video files) to "Prompt me each time", and the goddamn thing still just opened an explorer window. Then I went and set every value to "take no action", so that in absolutely no circumstance should it ever open an explorer window...and it opened an explorer window.

I deleted and reinstalled PowerDVD. Still only get an explorer window. Micros~1, in their typical helpful way, suggested using System Restore to set my system settings way back to when DVDs did work.

IIRC, there was an option for DVD-video in the AutoPlay tab last time, but the bugger's gone now

[Dr Unne]

I think you'll find a patch here: http://www.gentoo.org It's pretty big though, you might need to burn it to a CD. Then reboot and it should fix everything.

Do you have TweakUI, aka Powertools, for XP? http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp Maybe that'll help you fix it.

[Yamaneko]

Originally posted by Dr Unne
I think you'll find a patch here: http://www.gentoo.org It's pretty big though, you might need to burn it to a CD. Then reboot and it should fix everything.
That made me laugh so hard. You just made my day Unne. :)

Perhaps this (http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/11/autoplay/) will help. Or this (http://is-it-true.org/nt/xp/atips/atips7.shtml).

[Citizen Bleys]

Right, except that playing DVDs on Linux at all--let alone the crappiest distro of Linux, not excluding Yellow Dog--is a nightmare. Linux is just getting to the point where it can play DVDs at all--And not divX movies without extensive configuration--leave alone using the menu to navigate through the scenes and extras, so I'll be using Windows for my DVD watching for a good long time.

[Dr Unne]

*doesn't talk at all about how xine plays DVDs and divx and pretty much every other format of video I can think of just fine, and how all you need to do to install it and all its dependencies and codecs in gentoo is type "emerge xine-ui" and wait*

Did TweakUI work? I never had good experience with autoplaying CDs in Windows. Usually I just give up with trying to configure anything, hold down SHIFT while the CD first gets read (holding down SHIFT overrides any auto-playing of CDs, generally) and then open it up in Explorer.

[Citizen Bleys]

TweakUI doesn't do anything, and holding down SHIFT disables autoplay, while I want to re-enable it and make it work properly.

pssst, PowerDVD > mplayer > a dead rat > xine

[Dr Unne]

I thought you wanted to disable explorer-window-opening. It's better than nothing.

EDIT: What I read said in TweakUI, you can mess with autoplay under My Computer>Autoplay>Handlers. Not that I have any way to check that at the moment.

[Citizen Bleys]

*dies*

I found the problem.

I hacked explorer.exe to change my start menu text to "Wintermute"

I guess if you change the text to anything over 5 characters, it overwrites some other stuff in explorer.exe, so yeah.

I am SMRT.

[Yamaneko]

Knowing Windows, it probably overwrited everything.

[crono_logical]

Originally posted by Citizen Bleys
*dies*

I found the problem.

I hacked explorer.exe to change my start menu text to "Wintermute"

I guess if you change the text to anything over 5 characters, it overwrites some other stuff in explorer.exe, so yeah.

I am SMRT. If you use a proper resource editor to hack the file, it'll grow/shrink to accomodate everything without overwriting stuff :p Why you want to make the text longer, I don't know, it takes up enough space as it is already - the icon on it's own would be sufficient for me :p

[Citizen Bleys]

I wanted Wintermute because it's my host name.

[Endless]

I believe there are programs that allow you to rename the start button without requiring resource editing.
http://www.tipsdr.com/xp-start-button.html
http://www.webattack.com/get/startbtn.shtml

Also some sites believe there isn't a 5 char limit:
http://www.theeldergeek.com/change_text_on_xp_start_button.htm

To which I could agree, since by default, mine uses 8 chars. Using reshack should allow you to bypass the 5 char limit of regular hexing.

[Citizen Bleys]

The eldergeek site is the one I used to get Wintermute as a start button name...which in turn broke my DVD auto-detection.

[Dr Unne]

http://www.gentoo.org

[Citizen Bleys]

That's a very nice link if I want to break everything that does work, Unners.