Techie help required please! *bats eyelashes*

[mitchy]

I'm having major problems playing DVDs on my computer, but only film dvds. Playback is fine at first but after about five minutes the playback becomes choppy and rapidly degenerates until it is unwatchable. I've updated every single driver I can think of, I'm using the latest version of DirectX, I've got the latest K-lite codec pack installed and the DVDs appear to be in good condition, no major scratches or flaws. I do not have any problems with other types of video playback - mp4 and avi files are just fine. And, weirdly, I haven't had any problems watching DVDs of TV shows, just films. The problem exists across all the media players I have on my PC.

I'm running Windows XP which has been regularly updated. I'm currently triple checking for viruses and unwanted spyware but I have done this before and nothing improved. Graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce G11, sound card is RealTek Audio.

Any ideas guys? I've about reached the point where I'm thinking it's gotta be the DVD drive being freaky and I'll just buy another one. :P

ETA: doccy has walked me through a few things, like deleting a spare Primary IDE Channel that seemed to be redundant, tweaking the Registry, making sure DMA was being used, deleting some recent windows updates to see if they caused the problem etc. So far no joy. I have been able to play some DVDs successfully but not all. I can't find the common denominator. *sighs*

Comments

[silenttex.livejournal.com]

Anything to do with DVD regions? Or NTSC vs PAL? i.e. the ones that play are region 2 disks, the ones that don't are region 1?
Do you have any software running to get around region encoding? DVD43 or similar?

Unplug and replug the cable from motherboard to DVD drive.
Try running some tests with DCSpeed2000: http://www.cdspeed2000.com/index.html
That should give you an idea if it's reading data from the disc OK. Try it with a few discs.
Clean the DVD lens - TBH, if you don't already have a lens cleaner, I'd just buy another drive. A lens cleaner will be £5-10. You should be able to pick up a new drive for £10-15 assuming you can use a SATA drive. If you only have IDE/PATA you'll have to pay around double that for a PATA drive, or buy a converter, or install a SATA card.

[mitchy.livejournal.com]

*lightbulb*

Y'know, Tex, I think you're on to something about the regions. My PC is set to Region 2, all the discs I'm trying are Region 2, but DVD43 checks them anyway. I'm going to try a few discs with DVD43 turned off before I attempt to play them, see if that's causing the interference.

I'll let you know, thank you!