DVD's freeze when menu appears

[chriskobar]

I have a 2-year old Micron 733MHz PIII running Windows XP Professional (installed "clean") and an ATI Radeon 7500 card. My DVD-Rom drive is a factory installed Samsung SD-612.

Before putting XP on my machine a year ago, DVD's worked fine, albeit sometimes a bit choppy. (I had an nVidia card at the time.) Until last night, I had never played a DVD since upgrading to XP or with the new ATI card.

Now, with both Windows Media Player and DirectDVD, DVD's play the intro video perfectly, but the moment it gets to the menu portion of the movie (the first interactive part), the application and even the entire system freezes. I've waited as long as 5 or more minutes, with no unfreezing or continued playing.

I have all the newest updates to Windows as well as my ATI card and the two applications and I've tested the above with different movies on both applications with the same results.

Help!

[Enchanter]

Give another DVD player software, such as PowerDVD, a try.

[chriskobar]

I tried WinDVD last night. That didn't work either.

Any other suggestions?

[chriskobar]

I am curious as to whether the screen resolution and color depth might affect things. Back in the days when DVDs *did* play on the box, I had to always change my screen resolution to 800x600. Now, with my ATI Radeon 7500 card I normally run my machine at 1600x1200 with 32-bit color. I tried 600x800 with 32-bit color the other night and it still crashed, but I'm wondering if a bit more playing around with these kinds of things might resolve the problem? Keep in mind that the DVDs DID seem to play okay at least for a minute or so...

[Enchanter]

A few suggestions that might just help:
1. Reinstall DirectX and the latest Catalyst driver
2. Ensure that your motherboard driver (usually AGP only) is installed
3. Ensure that the Radeon card is getting proper cooling
4. Try PowerDVD, as I suggested previously

[mrmike]

Re: DVD's freeze when menu appears

Originally posted by chriskobar
I have a 2-year old Micron 733MHz PIII running Windows XP Professional (installed "clean") and an ATI Radeon 7500 card. My DVD-Rom drive is a factory installed Samsung SD-612.

Before putting XP on my machine a year ago, DVD's worked fine, albeit sometimes a bit choppy. (I had an nVidia card at the time.) Until last night, I had never played a DVD since upgrading to XP or with the new ATI card.

Now, with both Windows Media Player and DirectDVD, DVD's play the intro video perfectly, but the moment it gets to the menu portion of the movie (the first interactive part), the application and even the entire system freezes. I've waited as long as 5 or more minutes, with no unfreezing or continued playing.

I have all the newest updates to Windows as well as my ATI card and the two applications and I've tested the above with different movies on both applications with the same results.

Help!

I had the same problem when I tried to play a burned DVD on a standalone DVD player. I determined my problem started when I upgraded to XP SP1.
My solution was to reinstall every piece of software and firmware associated with my drive.

[gd_nimrod]

Just a quick suggestion, but have you tried playing any other dvd?
Also, make sure you have free memory to play the dvd movie, sounds unlikely, but you may be using all of the processing power and vitual memory for some programs running in the system tray.