Microsoft Windows Media Player is great, and it ships for free with every version of Windows. It has powerful features that allow it to play CDs, DVDs and MP3 files. But did you know it can't play DVD movies out of the box on many Windows versions? How would you feel realizing that your brand-new, almighty PC that comes with everything and a free mouse pad cannot play a DVD movie right out of the box? It happened to me just a week after I bought a brand new Windows Vista-powered PC when I tried to put a rented DVD into the computer's DVD drive, only to get an error message. What? My brand new, dual-core, DirectX 10 PC with over half a gig on-board video memory cannot play a DVD that my two year old notebook has no problem with? There must be something wrong, I thought, and I clicked the 'Web Help' button. After reading several pages of amazingly irrelevant information, I finally found a small link that suggested I don't have a DVD Decoder installed. I was offered the option to pay $159 to upgrade my version of Windows to one that could play DVDs, or to pay $15 (the cheapest option) to buy DVD player software that would essentially do the same - enable my computer to play DVDs. If it wasn't that it was only last week that I paid a grand and a half for that new computer with that new version of Windows, I would probably have parted with my hard-earned $15 to 'enable instant DVD playback' or get 'the kind of outstanding performance' offered by the marketers of Microsoft's suggested products. But not at that moment! I still had a fifteen hundred dollar hole in my budget, and did not want to spend any extra money on, well, extras. So I started searching for a free product that could play DVDs on my system no matter what. And finally, I found it - a free product that could play a DVD and not infect my computer with bugs and spyware! Meet AVS DVD Player by AVS Media, (http://www.avsmedia.com/), absolutely free software that plays DVDs, CDs, MP3s and DiVX if you're into that! I could finally watch that rented movie, and I also experimented with the features offered by this wonderful product. It allows taking snapshots during the movie, as well as capturing a DVD into a single, compressed video file. I am not into that DiVX mania of today's Internet crowd, but if you are, full support is there! After spending some time with AVS DVD Player, I learned to love it even more. It could play all my DVD movies, even those foreign PAL ones that my stand-alone DVD player always struggled with. It never displayed a movie in a stretched or distorted way, an unfortunate feature of my old notebook. And I had a choice of several skins to pick from (I preferred the Mini look by the way). And, the sound! Those who used Media Player for watching DVDs won't believe a DVD player can make any difference in this department. Well, AVS DVD Player certainly does! It supports multi-channel and true surround sound, making it easy to get immersed in the movie with just two speakers and a subwoofer.