From today’s Associated Press:
HOUSTON — Atlantis astronauts fixed the Hubble Space Telescope so it could beam cosmic pictures to Earth, but playing DVDs on their laptops is proving too difficult.
With an unwanted off day Friday because thunderstorms prevented their scheduled landing, the astronauts intended to pass the time by watching movies they brought on the mission. But when they tried to play them, they found out their laptops didn’t have the proper software.
Engineers on the ground tried to troubleshoot the problem — just as they did when a hand rail almost prevented spacewalkers from fixing one instrument in Hubble. After more than an hour with no solution, the astronauts gave up.
Astronaut John Grunsfeld radioed to Earth that they’d have to wait to watch something at a terrestrial movie theater.
So fixing a giant telescope in space worked fine, but getting their laptops to play a DVD didn’t work. I certainly sympathize as Windows typically needs additional codecs loaded to play DVDs. They should have had a copy of the free VLC media player.