A curious story has unfolded on our forum over the last few days. A reader posted a question about playing DVDs on Vista. CyberLink PowerDVD was fine but Windows Media Player reported a problem with the digital copy protection between the DVD drive, decoder and video card. Upgrading the graphics card drivers was the recommend fix but this had not helped.

It has to be said that my interest was piqued by this questions because of an article about copy protection that did the rounds when Vista was released. It raised several concerns about quality being automatically degraded if there was the possibility of the copy protection technology being circumvented.

The reality seemed very different, we ripped MP3s, played DVDs, took screen grabs from DVDs and recorded audio from protected files (test purposes only, of course). None of this was with HD content however.

Sadly the situation seems a little less exciting than first thought. According to KnowledgeBase article 935466 this error message appears if the computer is put in sleep mode or a 3D screensaver starts while the movie is paused.