DVD Movie stalls the computer?
 

So.. I've got a shitty old DVD player drive, a 24x HP CDWriter CD-burner, a 200 GB IDE hard-drive and a 60 GB IDE hard-drive. Master-slave, Master-slave. They're all taken up.

I've also got 1GB PC3200 Corsair RAM and an X800 XL.

Now -- the question. Playing games, or watching MPEG3 movies on my computer is not a problem. Lately, however.. I'll be watching a DVD movie (straight from the box -- not burned) and my computer will stall out. The hard-drive light will be going crazy, enough though I have nothing running in the background. It makes the movie pause for 8 or 10 seconds (really annoying when it happens every minute or so..)

Is this the IDE ribbons being in contention for resources? If so, how can I solve the problem...? I'm tempted to scrap the two optical drives and buy one huge DVD/CD burning/reading combo, but I don't want the problem to happen again.

Anybody got a clue?

i take it videos play fine off the harddrives directly, as well any skipping if playing just a regular music cd?

Movies and songs from CD or HD are fine..

what movie player software do you use, WMP, powerdvd? do they all skip?

WMP -- PowerDVD doesn't seem to work for me.

I'm not sure if its the player.. its pretty random when/where it happens in the movie, so I'd have to watch a movie all the way through in each player..

Try vlc, always worked way better than anything else for me.
Also, you made sure all cables are secured properly? I know I've had weird problems before that appeared because of cables not being attached properly.

My advice is to put one HDD and ODD on the same cable, then put the other HDD and ODD on the same cable. I've had a buttload of trouble with two opticals on one channel :-/

Might your DVD player not like the copy protection scheme being used?
Is there a firmware update for the drive?

Does the drive play unprotected DVDs correctly?

Just a thought...

and another...
If you just leave connected the boot drive, and this DVD drive on the sec. controller does the problem go away?