How to watch DVDs on your Chromebook

Otherwise truly proficient, Chromebooks are known to fall short in a handful of pitfalls. One of these includes the lack of an optical disc drive, which means that you won’t be able to access the DVD’s statement. However, focusing on Chrome OS’s true convenience, having a disc drive mounted on would defeat this system’s main purpose – simplicity and speed.

Nevertheless, if a Chromebook is already fulfilling all your basic, advanced requirements alike, and all that’s left to be asked is somehow playing DVDs, fret not, because ChromeReady has you covered. In this article, we’ll be going over how you can start watching DVDs on your Chrome OS without having to involve yourself in worrying and unwanted hassles. Let’s dive straight in.

Watching DVDs on Chromebook

The Process Explained

What you’re going to need primarily for playing DVDs on your Chromebook is an external disc drive. These usually come with a USB cable that can be connected to the Chrome OS easily. Don’t worry; you can find good-quality external disc drives for a relatively low price on popular marketplaces such as Amazon. Expect a price tag of around $30, and that should be good enough. We recommend the Hitachi LG DVD drive, compatible with most Chromebooks.

Unfortunately, we can’t stress the importance of an external drive enough because Chrome OS isn’t capable of burning DVDs or CDs. If you use a blank disc and try to access it on the Chromebook, the system treats it with zero accessibility. Nothing is detected, and therefore, you can’t do anything with it. This is why your first step is dedicated to purchasing a compatible external disc drive that can be used along with the open-source nature of Chrome OS.

Reference – Amazon

Next, you’re going to proceed with something equally important. The external drive that will contain your DVD isn’t going to play the video by itself, and that’s why you’ll have to rely on a fantastic third-party application called VLC Media Player.   You can read all about it in another one of our articles with more details here, but for now, we’re going to stick with a brief overview of installing this application to your Chromebook.

Installing VLC Player

VLC Media Player is available on the Play Store and via the Linux Terminal, but probably the best way to install it right onto your system is through the Chrome Web Store. To get started, click on this link.

Downloading VLC Player

As depicted in the screenshot above, click on the shown area. Doing that will take you to the Chrome Web Store, where you can easily download VLC Media Player. Here’s how you can do that below.

Adding VLC to Chrome

After you click on “Add to Chrome,” you’ll be asked for confirmation by a prompt. Proceed from there, and the VLC Player should be installed on your system in a couple of minutes.

Playing DVDs Using the VLC Player

Now that you’ve got most of the work ticked off, the rest is relatively easy and uncomplicated. We’ll explain how to do this in the following simple steps.

1) Insert the DVD in your external disc drive and hook it up with your Chromebook. The system should detect the drive shortly.

2) As soon as you do that, continue by launching the VLC player. The difference you’re going to notice now is how the player isn’t going to launch with the same familiar menu pop-up. Instead, you’ll be greeted with a file picker window inside the VLC player where you’ll find different segments of your DVD. You can click on any of them to start watching.

The process might be not that efficient, but it’s the best you can get if you want to play DVD’s on your Chromebook – considering how we’re going out of our way and pulling off something not meant to be doable with Chrome OS.

What to Do If the Method Doesn’t Work

Please note that Chromebooks do not openly detect all external disc drives. If you really want to watch DVDs on them, you must be willing to look extensively for Chrome OS’s right type of device. This will save you a lot of trouble and will resolve your problem for you. It was important to write this down here in the article since most playability issues are concerned with the disc drives.

However, when you’ve got all that sorted, everything must align perfectly. We wish you a great watching experience!