No sound when playing DVD or CD, but sound working

My sound works good on my computer. When I tried to play a DVD or CD in WMP or Real, no sound.
What could be the problem? Chris.

 

Did you check your mixer? The little speaker icon in the Taskbar Notification Area. If it's not there, try enabling it from Sound and Audio Devices in Control Panel. See that what you want to listen to is not muted and the volume slider turned up at least so you can hear sound when you play it.

If you were on Windows 98 I'd also say to check that your cd/dvd drives are set for digital playback. (Right click the drive in My Computer and choose Properties in XP, or go to Multimedia Properties on 98.) Newer machines with Windows XP have this enabled by default. Analog playback is for older machines that have a little cable running from the cd/dvd drive to the soundcard. So, if you don't have this cable hooked up you only can hear audio from the cd/dvd drives digitally.

Windows Media Player and RealPlayer also can be set to use analog or digital playback from their options panel's.

I assume since you posted in the Windows XP forum that you are using Windows XP?

It's strange that you report all your other sound working fine. If it isn't, also check in Device Manager to see if there are any warning X's (icons) next to your soundcard listing. If so, you would probably need to reinstall your soundcard driver. Be sure to download the latest available from your card manufacturer's website if this is the case.

 

Have you attached an audio cable from the CD player to the sound card, into it's CD Audio plug. Most PCs will play audio from CD without it fine, and some will but it will be bad quality or skip. Just a thought.

Also try installing the WMP codec package in case you have some faulty codecs. WMP9 codec package is suitable for WMP10 btw.

You can find it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/format/codecdownload.aspx