You may have noticed that you can’t play DVDs in Windows Media Player without buying DVD codec software. This is sad, but true. There is no free DVD codec for Windows Media Player, due to licensing issues.

However – there is one free piece of software that can play DVDs.

VLC Media Player by VideoLAN can play just about any kind of file out there, and it also has built in support for DVDs! It has a small memory footprint and is very quick to load.