You’d click on the option to play the full movie, and end up on a settings screen instead-the menu option right below the one you wanted. I encountered one annoyance, where some DVD menus couldn’t be navigated properly. There are also controls hidden under three dots to jump back to the DVD menu. Controls are easy enough to manipulate with a mouse, and it covers all the basics: play/pause, fast forward, rewind, and chapter skipping.

Once I inserted a disk all I had to do was fire up Windows DVD Player, and the disc started playing after a few minutes.

All five DVDs I tested worked, ranging from studio movies to exercise videos. So now that I know the DVD player works with the Lenovo, it’s time to invest $15 of PCWorld’s hard-earned money to see how it plays actual movies. So to recap, my 7-year-old Sandy Bridge PC also running Windwas compatible, while an Acer Aspire with the more modern Kaby Lake processor wasn’t. This combo worked with Microsoft’s DVD Player app in 2015 and, as it turns out, still does. With no luck on the Acer, I turned to my trusty Lenovo X220 and an external Transcend standard DVD player/burner.

Free dvd software for an hp laptop