Windows XP bizarrness

[karohemd]

I have a CD (Trauma Pet - 1) that has some multimedia content as well as CD tracks on it. I could see the multimedia content on my work PC (Win2000) but I can't here. I only see the cda tracks in Explorer.
Anyone know what's up? lineoutrecords?

Comments

[lineoutrecords.livejournal.com]

Not sure we gave it a fairly good testing and didn't have any probs with XP machines (mine are both XP). I'll have a poke around and see if I can work anything out.

it's getting weirder

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

It works fine on my laptop which is also XP SP2...

Re: it's getting weirder

[lineoutrecords.livejournal.com]

How odd.....

Somebody mentioned it may be connected to autostart settings, this may be absolute nonsense.

I'll keep you posted (and let me know if you work out what's going on before I do)

Re: it's getting weirder

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

This is the difference between my PC and laptop, actually (autostart off on PC and on on laptop) but this shouldn't make a difference while *viewing* the content.
Activating Autoplay on PC doesn't make a difference, although I haven't tried a restart.

How very odd indeed.

[aardnebby.livejournal.com]

If you have a CD drive cleaner try that. Also try cleaning the CD. Its a basic thing but often with computers its the most silly things that go wrong and stump the experts ;)

Also if the CD is one of those weird semi-DVD things you may need a DVD reader to see all of it. Not sure how common those are, since my main drive does both.

Good luck finding a solution :)

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

It's a CD-R and i tried it in both my DVD/CD-R drive and my DVD writer, nada. Works fine on my laptop's DVD burner, though.

[aardnebby.livejournal.com]

Hmm, odd. Kinda discounts it needing a clean also if the same cd works only in certain systems one after the other despite multiple drives being tried.

Sounds more like software then, do you have media software beyond the windows basic on your laptop and work comp but not on desktop? EG my PC has a Sony drive that came with Nero software. The InfoTool showed what features were enabled for my drive (read and write). (Amusingly it claimed I had an Nvidia Geforce 7950 GX2 video out despite all other tests I have ever run showing it correctly as an Nvidia Geforce 7900GTX)

You may need specific media software installed (EG Realplayer, Quicktime or one of the more obscure ones like an OGM or MKV viewer). Though no idea why it should not show them (even as unrecognisable file types). Have you got your folder options to set to show all files (including hidden/system files)? Possibly your CD/DVD drivers are not set to recognise multiple media type discs (A driver update would fix this).

Sorry if these are somewhat random questions, it can be a little tricky to diagnose an issue like this unless you have encountered it before, and though I do recall running into the problem with an old laptop, I was never a big fan of music/media discs and so I never really looked into it at the time (about 10 years ago).

[aardnebby.livejournal.com]

In addition to this I recall somewhere that when you first put a new CD type into a drive Windows XP asks "what would you like to do with this file type (audio music disc)?". There is an option _somewhere_ that lets you read it as a data disc with CD tracks present (rather than effectively letting your CD drive interpret it as a CD player would and feeding the output directly to your audio-out). This has pros and cons, the advantage of it is obviously more control over the data on the CD, the downside is that playing the content is likely to be more CPU intensive (unless you have a good soundcard with its own audio processor, in which case it would use that more intensively).

This is mostly me interpreting the settings I have seen, I am not an expert on multimedia, so apologies if my conjecture turns out to be wrong. Just hope it helps!

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

The curious thing is that I only see the audio tracks. if the CD were dirty/corrupt or something, it wouldn't show anything, I guess.

That only runs when autoplay is on.
I also don't think it's a driver issue as my drives are a lot younger than the grotty old CD drive at work.

[susanofstohelit.livejournal.com]

do you have it set up to view hidden files?

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Well, the files aren't hidden.

[susanofstohelit.livejournal.com]

well, that's it for my ideas. :-)