For years now I have been editing DVDs on a Casablanca editing system. However, when I attempt to play these DVD on my Windows XP computer, the video plays fine but there is no audio. If I play the DVD on a standalone DVD player, both the video and audio plays. Can you help?

This problem is likely related to the way the audio has been encoded on the disc. A first possibility is the codec which was used to encode the DVDs is not installed on the computers which are being used to play the DVDs. The codec allows the media (e.g. audio or video) to be decoded into a format which can be played on the device. Should the correct codec not be installed on the player device, it will be unable to decode the media and therefore will not play correctly, or at all. Normally, if the codec is not supported by the software player, the software should alert you that the video or audio will not play correctly unless the codec is downloaded. Should the Casablanca system allow you to encode the DVD audio using different codecs, try using a different codec to test the effect when playing the disc on a computer and on a standalone DVD player. Should you continue to have problems, try playing the DVD with some other DVD player software, to see if you can find any players which do support the DVD. Your DVD drive should have come with bundled player software and you can also try using Windows Media Player.

Another possibility, relating to the audio encoding is the audio has not been encoded at the correct KHz. The audio track on DVDs should generally be encoded at 48 KHz, but some authoring software allows the audio to be encoded at different rates (e.g. 44.1 KHz). You should check the Casablanca system for this setting and similar other settings, to see whether changing these can help fix the problem. Remember to note down the original settings before changing them, in case you need to go back to the original settings. I would be interested to hear if any other readers have experienced similar difficulties with DVD audio not playing.