Spinning Sage Icon and DVD freeze up

[bclenney]

First of all, I've been using SageTV for 2 years and love it for recording TV, commercial skip and burning of DVDs. Second of all.. DVD playback has always sucked for me. I've used external players, the sage built in player and no matter what it has sucked. Right now I use SageTV 6.0 and the internal DVD player. I get about 3/4 of the way through a DVD and then I get a spinning sage icon and it just sits there(sometimes they play fine but if I try to forward fast or rewind it's likely to end badly). CPU usage is normal. DVD LED is flashing away. Can't Alt-F4 out of Sage. I can kill the process via the task manager or reboot. What is the secret of getting good DVD playback? I own Zoomplayer Pro so I'd like to use that, but when I had it set up via Sage to be called I had no volume control and my remote is all but useless. I can stop the show or start the show. That's about it. I'd buy TheaterTek or another player if someone would give me step by step directions. Can anyone give me any pointers? What's the frickin secret? I don't know the version of Sage off the top of my head but I installed it at the beginning of the year and it was the most recent at that time. My Java is up to date also. I use SageMC.

Please someone help me. I'm sick of never knowing if the DVD is going to work and being afraid to try to forward fast or rewind for fear that it will break. The wife acceptance factor is an issue too.

[Razillian]

A little info about your system would be most helpful, so here is the standard list of questions:

1) What operating system are you running Sage on?
2) Are you using Sage in service mode?
3) What video decoders are set in Sage for DVD playback? Mpeg playback?
4) By "Java up to date" do you mean using the autoupdater in Java or have you manually downloaded and installed JRE 6?
5) Have you tried playing a DVD in Windows Media Player to see if it has the same problem? and if so, what was the result? if not, give that a try.
6) Are these retail DVDs or are they, umm, backups of, umm, home movies?