Problems with DVD playback freezing under Windows XP

[VideoSan]

I am having an increasingly occurring problem with DVD
playback freezing on my laptop. Here are more details.

System: IBM A31 Thinkpad running Windows XP Pro, with 512MB memory.
Teac DVD/CD-RW installed as drive D:, and LG4082 DVD writer
connected via USB 2.0 external as drive E:. Using Windows Media
Player 10 and WinDVD as viewers.

DVDs are recorded/finalized using Panasonic E75V set-top
recorder with Verbatim 4X DVD-R discs. All recordings are
using EP mode (i.e. 8 hour max on the DVD-R). The DVDs play
just fine on set-top DVD players, including non-Panasonics.

When I play the DVDs on either drive, using either WMP10 or WinDVD,
and I'm in scan mode (20X on WMP and about 10X on WinDVD), I
find that the image will freeze at arbitrary points. It may
then unfreeze a few seconds later, but the scan mode will slow
to about 2X. Or, the freeze will sustain without any additional
intervention allowed, requiring me to terminate the viewer.
Sometimes I can terminate the viewer via clicking on the
upper-right-hand X or by right-clicking on the task bar
and closing the application. Sometime that won't
even work, and I have to use Task Manager to terminate the
application.

I can eject the DVD and reinsert it and restart the viewer
and reposition back to a location shortly before the point
where the freeze occurred, and I am able to continue scanning
without a problem, but then a freeze may occur at a later
point.

I find that I can reboot and the problem doesn't happen
until I've scanned a couple of DVDs, and then the problem
returns.

The fact that I get this freezing regardless of which drive I
use, or which viewer I use, and I get it at different spots
on the DVDs, leads me to believe the problem is not in the
drives, the viewers, or the DVDs, but instead somewhere
within the OS.


Does anyone have suggestions on what settings I might look for?

[jimmalenko]

Sounds to me like your PC cannot keep up with the transfer rate required. Just not enough grunt to sustain that sort of operation, I'd say.

[VideoSan]

I will point out that I hadn't experienced this problem very much until recently, and I've had the laptop for over 3 years, and the E75V for a little under 2 years.

[jimmalenko]

Laser on the DVD drive might be wearing out ... although the fact you can reboot and it's all good for a little while to me points to the laptop itself. Done a defrag, or even a fresh reinstall of the OS lately ? That would be the path I'd go down.

[redwudz]

If the computer is up to the task of playing DVDs, then I suspect you have something else running that is bogging it all down.

Check the Task Manager when this happens. You can leave it on while playing a disc. First, check Applications and see if any besides the player are on. Then Processes and see if any are using an unusual amount of memory. You can click on 'Mem Usage' to sort by memory use. Then check performance and see how much memory and CPU power you are using. If the CPU is maxed out when playing, that may be your problem.

But it should be able to play the discs without those problems, unless you have a very slow CPU. You might try a different player, such a VLC or Media Player Classic to see if the problem is universal.

Also check on your hard drive free space. If your memory is all being used, the OS will use the hard drive for temp memory. If it's near full, that will cause problems.

[VideoSan]

OK, I started running tests. There is a lighted icon on the laptop panel that indicates when the hard disk is being hit. I find when I initially load a DVD and start scanning, there's not much hard disk activity (as if there'd need to be) and then the icon starts flickering. Eventually when the freeze happens, the light is solid. I checked in Task Manager and it appears the only thing writing I/O is lsass.exe. And it's not going up very quickly. The WinDVD player seems to max out at about 22MB of memory. I have 512MB, although I'm not sure how much is free at the time I'm running WinDVD. It had been suggested that I might be paging. I do have around 9G of hard disk space available. I'm wondering if there's some kind of buffer overflow that's occurring. But whatever it is, it's only recently started happening. Again this happens regardless of the DVD, drive being used, or player being used.