Scribblings from the Mitchy Side

Many, many thanks to doccy and silenttex who between them fixed my DVD playback problems.

Turns out that in addition to a couple of techie things, DVD43 was interfering with the playback. Turned that off before attempting to play R2 DVDs and allll was well. (Well ok, Windows Media Player still tantrums, but VLC works like a dream).

So THANK YOU you two! One day cold beverages of your choice will be yours :D

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*

A question for you.

I have a series of AVI files (episodes of a TV show). I want to cut the "Previously on.." segment at the beginning of each ep, because it's screwing up the subtitles. What's the quickest and simplest way to do that? (I can't get QuickTime to work which is a pity as that sounded easy as). I've tried VirtualDub and that was ok, but it took 15 minutes to save each ep. Blarg. I've got 26 of these things!

Any thoughts? :)