DVDs Will Not Play

[jasonrw]

Hello,

I use VLC to play commercial DVD movies, both region and region-free. Lately VLC 2.0.8 will not play the discs. I usually just put the disk in the computer's drive, VLC auto-runs the content and that's it. Now, VLC just does nothing and any interaction with it to make it play results in a greyed-out window with the Windows' "Not Responding" in the title bar. Shortly after this, Windows Explorer itself will crash, forcing a log-off or reboot of the machine. I am using Windows 7 Pro x64 on an Intel Core i7 CPU with 8GB of RAM. Upgrading to VLC 2.1.0 did not fix the problem. Where can I look for a log file or a dump of what exactly is going on? One test that did work was running VLC as an administrator and telling Windows not to auto-run DVD content with VLC. However, this computer is used in a classroom and various people log into it as regular users, not administrators. Reinstalling VLC and deselecting the option to have VLC be the defaults for the various A/V codecs did not change the auto-run behavior. VLC will still auto-run movies once the disc is inserted and will crash shortly thereafter. I really need VLC to play movies in this room, as WMP doesn't really work either. Any ideas as to what may be happening?

Thanks in advance

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Weird. Hardware issue?