DVD Playback Sticky

New Compaq Laptop running XP Home...

I'm not extremely technical, but I'm willing to try anything once! I have a
bunch of DVDs that I cannot play (in full) in any of my players (InterVideo,
InterActual and MediaPlayer). I thought maybe it had to do with the fact
that some of my movies are international copies - until Blockbuster did it to
me, too. A movie will sometimes:

-freeze on insertion, not recognize disc
-play and halt in about 3 seconds.
-play and halt halfway through the movie.
-play and halt sporadically, recover until it freezes completely.

I have gotten an error message saying my decoders are incomplete, only to
start over and have the movie play in full without having to do anything
else. I have installed nVidia's decoder, which is compatible with InterVideo
(the program that has the decoders on my machine).

I find the errors/freezing to be somewhat inconsistent.

I have used troubleshooter, called tech support only to hang up mid-way
(time restraints), and have messed with many, many video settings.

Can anyone give me some feedback?

Aloha
~mello

unistall everything and install only one dvd player program.
or run in safe mode and try to edit.

"mello" wrote:

> New Compaq Laptop running XP Home...
>
> I'm not extremely technical, but I'm willing to try anything once! I have a
> bunch of DVDs that I cannot play (in full) in any of my players (InterVideo,
> InterActual and MediaPlayer). I thought maybe it had to do with the fact
> that some of my movies are international copies - until Blockbuster did it to
> me, too. A movie will sometimes:
>
> -freeze on insertion, not recognize disc
> -play and halt in about 3 seconds.
> -play and halt halfway through the movie.
> -play and halt sporadically, recover until it freezes completely.
>
> I have gotten an error message saying my decoders are incomplete, only to
> start over and have the movie play in full without having to do anything
> else. I have installed nVidia's decoder, which is compatible with InterVideo
> (the program that has the decoders on my machine).
>
> I find the errors/freezing to be somewhat inconsistent.
>
> I have used troubleshooter, called tech support only to hang up mid-way
> (time restraints), and have messed with many, many video settings.
>
> Can anyone give me some feedback?
>
> Aloha
> ~mello

>From your description, I'd be tempted to take my machine to the shop
(or to a friend who has an external DVD drive) and see if my DVDs play
properly using an external drive - just to eliminate the possibility of
a hardware problem.