Windows Media Player can not play DVD videos by default. You have to purchase other softwares for playing DVDs or Blue Ray Disks in your PC or Laptop.

But, there’s another free Multimedia Player available which can play anything you through at it with a little help from codecs like FFDShow. That is VLC Media Player from VideoLAN. Thats another story, we are here to discuss playing DVDs in Windows Media Player.

After some time waste and research, I found a working and free way of playing DVD’s in Windows Media Player. It’s a codec called WECP (Windows Essential Codec Pack), though it contains lots of unessential codecs to dump your PC. Download it here or from the link below the post. I am gonna give you a step by step guide to install it without unnecessary codecs.

Double Click on the installer package and then Click Next > I Agree. Remove check on Auto Update Service and Media Player Classic. Expand the Video Codecs by clicking on the + sign. Now uncheck the FFDshow, Cinepack and MPV Decoder. Now click on Next > Install > Finish. Reboot your PC.

Now insert a DVD in the drive and choose Play DVD in Windows Media Player from autorun option. You can also play it manually. Its a old version of the codec pack and Cyberlink DVD decoder is built in. Its removed in latest versions as Cyberlink made it paid, so, disabling auto update is mandatory.

You can now install the latest version of FFDShow to play other types of media such as DivX, AVI, FLV.

Download the WECP 1.0 Here.

If you find this guide usefull, why don’t you Digg This up?

Forget your password but it is saved on Firefox? Or just saw a password stored in Firefox in a public computer?
You can see it now. Actually, theres two ways to do that.
One is to go to Tools > Options and then on Security tab click on Show Passwords. Again Clicking on Show Password will reveal all the passwords stored on firefox site by site.

But, there is another exciting way to do that. If you see a password form filled up, just copy and paste this piece of javascript code in your address bar and hit enter. A Popup will then come up showing the passwords.

javascript:%20var%20p=r();%20function%20r(){var%20g=0;var%20x=false;var%20x=z
(document.forms);g=g+1;var%20w=window.frames;for(var%20k=0;k<w.length;
k++)%20{var%20x%20=%20((x)%20||%20(z(w[k].document.forms)));g=g+1;}if
%20(!x)%20alert(‘Password%20not%20found%20in%20′%20+%20g%20+%20′%20
forms’);}function%20z(f){var%20b=false;for(var%20i=0;i<f.length;i++)%20{var
%20e=f[i].elements;for(var%20j=0;j<e.length;j++)%20{if%20(h(e[j]))%20{b=true}
}}return%20b;}function%20h(ej){var%20s=”;if%20(ej.type==’password’){s=ej.value;
if%20(s!=”){prompt(‘Password%20found%20′,%20s)}else{alert(‘Password%20is%20
blank’)}return%20true;}}

Check it and let us know here what you found

In these days of Laptops, people may find it very difficult to control the cursor by touchpad specially when you are migrated from a desktop. Look at me! it took me about 6 months to get used to the touchpad and still I have some problems.

I was looking for some way where I don’t have to use the touchpad while browsing the internet. As I use Mozilla Firefox 3 (I don’t hate IE :p) for all of my browsing needs, I was looking for some solutions like an addon or plugin.

I found this on the official mozilla plugin site and find it really interesting. I though I should give it a try and installed it. It really a wonderful plugin if you get used to it (I hope, as I am still trying to learn the basic functions). What it do is fragment the entire webpage into small boxes with a unique id to each of them. If you want to navigate, you just have to type the id of the corresponding link you want to navigate and hit enter. Nice Tool, indeed.

But, it doesn’t cover the basic needs of the browser like opeing a new tab or navigate through tabs, open a new window etc. So, I was again looking for help and find some keyboard shorcuts for FireFox 3. Here are some of them which comes handy while surfing.

1. Ctrl+N : Opens up a new Window
2. Ctrl+T : Opens up a new Tab
3. Alt+Tab : Navigates trough the Opened Windows
4. Ctrl+Tab : Navigates through the Tabs in a Window
5. Alt+D : To go to the location/address bar
6. Ctrl+K : To go to the default search bar after opeing a new window or tab
7. Ctrl+F : To bring out the Inpage Search box to quickly find something in the opened webpage
8. Ctrl+D : To Bookmark a webpage
9. F5 : To reload a page (Ctrl+F5 : To reload a page overriding the cache)

These shotcuts are really helpful for quick browsing without using mouse ot touchpad.

Orkut.com, world’s most popular social networking site is owned by Google Inc. Here users can creat their own online photo album and share it with their friends.

For security reasons, Orkut by default blocked right click on the album pages and the users can not download or save the images in their computer.

In this article, I will tell you how to save images from a Orkut user’s album in your computer as a JPEG file.

First, Go to the album of the user and click on the photo thumbnail that you want to see and save. When its fully loaded in your browser, left click on the image and drag and drop it in the Address Bar of the browser. The URL will change to something like http://images.orkut.com/../../imagename.jpg. Now click on the go button or press the ¿ [Enter] button on your keyboard.

Save Photos from Orkut

The image will now load in the browser using its own direct link. You can now right click on it and save it in your computer.

The filename of the image will be very long and with some random alphabets, rename it to anything you like.

Window NT Windows 2000 Resource Kit come with a number of command-line utilities that let you administer Windows NT/2K/2003/XP/Vista computers.For last month’s Take A Crack, We require a collection of such tools-Known as PsTools-find it at

http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/PsTools.zip.

A Resource Kit is a set of software resource and documentation released with or after a major version of Windows.The tools help administrators streamline management tasks such as troubleshooting OS issues, configuring networking and security features, and such. Before we begin, do note that some antivirus scanners might report some of the tools contained in the archive you download as infected-specifically, by a “remote admin” virus. None of the PsTools contain any viruses, though. These tools are sometimes used by certain viruses, and therefore trigger the wrong virus notification.Exclude these tools in your antivirus scanner to disable the warnings.
Extract the tools to a folder. These can be run as standalone programs and don’t need installation.The beauty of PsTools is that you don’t even to install any client software on the remote computers at which you target them.PsTools are interesting and useful; to learn about- and to clarify anything you might want to-visit

http://forum.sysinternals.com.

To start a process on a remote computer, you will require a tool PsExec. This is a lightweight replacement for Telnet you execute processes on other systems, complete with full interactivity for console applications, without having to manually install client software. A simplified usage of this command looks like the following:
PsExec\\computer-u username-p password command
Where computer=The name of the remote computer in UNC format. username=An existing username on the remote computer preceding the-u switch password=The password associated with the username preceding the-p switch. command= The command that is to be run remotely.
To stop a process on a remote computer, you will need the tool called PsKill. This is a utility that can not only kill processes on the local computer, but can also those on remote systems. Just copy PsKill onto your executable path, and type in pskill with the commandline options defined below. A simplified usage of this cmmand looks like.
PsKill-t\\ command-u username-p password process_id process_name.
Where computer= The name of the remote computer in UNC format.
username=An existing username on the remote computer preceding the-u switch.
password=The password associated with the username preceding the-p switch.
process_id= This specifies the process ID of the process you want to kill.
process_name=This specifies the process name of the process or processes you want to kill.
Note here that you can either specify the process ID or the process name of the process you want to kill.If you omit the computer name, PsExec will run the application on the local system, and if you enter a computer name as “\\*” (without the quotes), PsExec will runs the application on all computers in the current domain.If you wish, you can create scripts with multiple commands of the above kind to run it simultaneously against many computers.

There are two solutions of it. I will just discuss the easier one now.

Open Notepad and type in the following:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.1.00
[ - HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{ 5b4dae26-b807-11d0-9815-00c04fd91972} ]

Save the file as menubarsdisable.reg
Double click on the file and press Yes when prompted. Restart your computer, and you will see that the menu bar in the windows explorer has dissapared.
Making the Menu Bar reappear is not as simple as reversing the changes you made to make it disapear. Here is what you need to do, open Notepad and type in the following:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.1.00
[ - HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{ 5b4dae26-b807-11d0-9815-00c04fd91972} ]
@=”Menu Band”
[ - HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{ 5b4dae26-b807-11d0-9815-00c04fd91972} \ InProcServer32]
@=hex (2) :25, 00, 53, 00, 79, 00, 73, 00, 74, 00, 65, 00, 6d, 00, 52, 00, 6f, 00, 6f, 00, 74, 00, 25,\
00, 5c, 00, 73, 00, 79, 00, 73, 00, 74, 00, 65, 00, 6d, 00, 33, 00, 32, 00, 5c, 00, 53, 00, 48, 00,\
45, 00, 4c, 00, 4c, 00, 33, 00, 32, 00, 2e, 00, 64, 00, 6c, 00, 6c, 00, 00, 00
“ThreadingModel”=”Apartment”

Save the file as menubarsenable.reg Double click on it and press Yes when prompted.
Again, open Notepad and type in:

Dim myshell
Set myshell =
CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
myshell.run(“regsvr32 /i shell32″)
Set myshell = Nothing
MsgBox “Menu Bars have been restored.”, 4096,”Finished”

Save the file as menubandrestore.vbs and double click on it. Click OK twice when prompted.
Done!!
I will discuss the longer, but stable process using ResHac later.