HD-DVD on Windows 10 with PowerDVD 7.3

Xbox HD-DVD Drive Image attribution Evan-Amos, Wikimedia commons and is public domain

As I’ve had a lot of trouble getting my HD-DVD collection to work in Windows 10 I thought I’d write a quick guide to help others and remind myself next time I reinstall or upgrade.

Prerequisites –

First off connect your HD-DVD drive to your PC and let windows install the drivers for it.

Next install and activate PowerDVD 7.3, if you now try to play a disc it will say incompatible graphics card, so download the CyberLink.5711_TaRe43_DVD090826-05 patch above, now before running the patch go to C:\Windows\Installer (this is a hidden directory so make sure your windows options let you see hidden and system files), delete the contents of this directory, you may get some warnings just click ok.

Now install the patch.  Once this has completed run PowerDVD again, it may say critical updates are needed, I clicked to allow them, once PowerDVD responds again play your HD-DVD and it should work.

I also installed Slysoft AnyDVD HD to avoid encryption or region issues.

Update: I have a report that using AnyDVD HD with Kodi allows viewing of HD-DVD discs too.

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24 thoughts on “HD-DVD on Windows 10 with PowerDVD 7.3

  • Anyone else had a problem installing the patch under Windows 10 using the latest updates? PDVD complains about being unable to install using the scripted installation.

    • I haven’t tried reinstalling it yet, Windows 10 is a pain with it’s updates that stop programs running, I know it’s supposed to be for security and but it keeps stopping legitimate programs.

  • Bugger, this didn’t work for my internal LG BD/HDDVD drive. Windows 10 seems to have removed HDDVD capability from the drive. DVDs & BDs allow me to ‘play’ but HDDVDs just show up as data. PowerDVD 7.3 autoplays them but then crashes. Looks like I’ll have to go digging to find my XBox HDDVD drive…

    • I haven’t tried using my old internal drive so thanks for letting me know, it’s annoying that VLC or similar don’t support HD DVD, I hope the xbox player works well for you and that Microsoft haven’t made any updates to stop that too.

  • Success! Kind of… Plugged in the XBox drive, let Win10 install it & so far 6 of 6 HDDVDs play in the drive via PowerDVD. (Still no luck with the internal drive) Both drives just show HDDVDs as data but the XBox drive allows them to play via PowerDVD. Point of the exercise is to get the content onto my NAS before my HDDVD hardware dies. MakeMKV won’t open most of them and won’t process most of the rest (I’m sure it worked fine under Win7 & older version of MakeMKV). So far only 1 of 6 tried has actually read & processed so I think it is now a MakeMKV problem rather than a Drive / OS one… maybe.

  • Hmm maybe install slysoft anydvd, I think they did an hd dvd version at one point, have a vague memory of it helping with copying, let me know if you have any success as it would be nice to copy mine to my media server too.

  • What version of Windows 10 did you use 32bit or 64bit I have tried on my main PC which is 64bit and it starts to play and exits out of PowerDVD.

    • Unfortunately not and my HD-DVD drive is playing up so I have no idea if this still works, I’m hoping it just needs cleaning, your best bet would be searching on torrent sites such as the pirate bay, I host the patch here but I can’t risk hosting the actual program.

  • Hi Daniel, after much searching I found your blog to my great happiness! I wondered if you knew how to activate the power DVD 7.3 with all the new updates already done through Cyberlink? its asking for a 15 digit code which I don’t have anymore…..I also have a Xbox hd-dvd drive as well as the LG 5.25 internal HD-DVD Blu-ray drive. any help would be gratefully appreciated!

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