Hey folks:  I am for the first time in my life trying to play a video
DVD on my desktop PC (believe it or not). I have a commercially
recorded documentary (title "King Corn") lent from a friend, and can't
get it to play properly. The problem is no sound.  The video looks
fine, but there's no audio output whatsoever. I've tried using Windows
Mediaplayer as well as a program called Media Player Classic. Both
behave pretty much the same way -- the video plays silently.

When the film first opens, it shows me a "menu" in the form of two
selections, the first of which is the film, the second is a blank box
labeled "Empty Title". I select the first box (which has the thumbnail-
size, shrunk-down opening shot of the movie). Then the screen is
filled with the opening scene in the playback window frame, and to the
right is a list of "chapters" in the DVD info window frame, listed
under the heading "Title 1".  Also on the opening screen is a sort of
on-screen, text menu that offers three choices:  Play, Chapters and
Audio Options.

It seems that Audio Options would be the thing to select at this
point, but I can't get it to respond. I tried clicking on it with the
mouse pointer. Also tried moving the selection highlight with the
arrow keys, and some other keys (spacebar, tab, page-up, page-down).
Nothing seems to move the highlight off the "Play" option.  So okay, I
Iet it start playing, but get no sound, even with the volume boosted
to the highest setting.

I played around a bit with some of the Win Mediaplayer menu options
that looked like they might be relevant to audio output, but to no
avail.  Is it possible that this disc is recorded in such a way to
preclude it from playing back (with audio) on a computer?

Everything else seems to work -- skipping forward, pausing and
resuming play.  I'm thinking that there's something very basic that
I'm missing.  But what?

On the DVD itself, there are two directories, VIDEO_RM and VIDEO_TS.
In the VIDEO_RM directory, there are three files:  VIDEO_RM.BUP,
VIDEO_RM.DAT and VIDEO_RM.IFO.  In the VIDEO_TS directory there are
ten files:

VIDEO_TS.BUP
VIDEO_TS.IFO
VIDEO_TS.VOB
VTS_01_0.BUP
VTS_01_0.IFO
VTS_01_1.VOB
VTS_01_2.VOB
VTS_01_3.VOB
VTS_01_4.VOB
VTS_01_5.VOB

I'm running Windows XP on a Dell P4 machine with 512MB RAM

thanks
Alex G.