Looking for sources of MPEG-2 codecs!

[MAFinOKC]

After years of being satisfied Dell customers, we had a horrible experience last year with a new Dell, so now we've gone to buying from a reputable local no-name clone shop. We're running Win XP Home on a PC with a Gigabyte main board, an AMD Phenom II processor, and a Radeon X1550 Series video card. It came with a Cyberlink DVD program that didn't seem to be working right, so I uninstalled it. So of course Windows Media Player became unable to play DVDs. I installed MPlayer Media Player and it plays DVDs just fine, but WMP didn't pick up the appropriate codecs for DVD playing from it. I installed XP Codec Pack 2.5.0 and now WMP says there's a conflict about digital rights management. XP Codec Pack installed the old Windows Media Player Classic and when I try to play DVDs on it, I get the error message "Digital Copy Protect Failure." Updating the video driver didn't help. What should I do next? Is it worth it to buy one of the Windows Media Player plugins for sale on the Microsoft website? I really hate to buy anything from Microsoft I don't have to buy.

Edited November 14, 2009 by MAFinOKC