DVD-Drive Spins Up During Movies

[Guest]

When I used to watch movies in Windows XP, my DVD player would correctly spin
at 1x, so as to minimize noise / vibrations. However, when I now watch
movies on the same drive and computer in Vista Ultimate x64, the DVD
consistently spins all the way up to maximum speed, which causes an unholy
racket. So far I have determined the following:

This occurs with all movie DVDs (I've tested several different titles)
This occurs both in WMP11 and all freeware players I've tested
This occurs with different codecs (tested Cyberlink's and ffdshow)
This occurs regardless of output settings (overlay, VMR9, EVR, etc.)
This DOES NOT occur if I play a movie in Cyberlink's PowerDVD player

This is a stab in the dark, but I'd guess the problem might have to do with
Microsoft's DVD navigator filter (?); everything else seems to be ruled out.
Also, I've already updated my drive (Pioneer DVR-110D) to the latest version,
which made no difference. Finally, for various reasons I don't want to use
PowerDVD, so I'd really much rather have other programs work properly. So:
does anyone have any idea why a modern DVD drive would run at full blast
during a movie?

 

[Guest]

flanger,

Since you're into stabs in the dark, here is mine: If your drive seems to
be changing speeds a lot (spinning quickly and then spinning slowly), a dirty
lens might be the cause, in which case a couple passes with a cleaning CD
would fix it. If spin-up problems such as this occur with certain discs only,
the data on the disc may be to blame. Certain types of copy protection make
deliberate errors on the disc, which may be confusing your drive. There isn't
much you can do about this, however.

Any other guesses?

 

[Guest]

Actually I recently discovered my video player (Zoom Player) allows me to
select which DVD navigator I want to use, and sure enough, when I use
Cyberlink's navigator, movies play back correctly at 1x. Maybe Microsoft's
navigator buffers too much data, causing the drive to 'think' its reading a
data disc and not playing back a movie? I dunno... on the other hand, if
there was something inherently wrong with Vista's built-in DVD navigator,
you'd think a *lot* more people would be having problems. Either way, the
problem is more or less fixed for me, though the whole thing is still kind of
baffling.