VLC 0.8.1 freezes my Mac when playing a DVD

[gidds]

Twice this evening I've tried to play a particular DVD, and twice it's suddenly frozen. At different points, and there are no other signs of trouble reading the DVD, so it doesn't look like a physical problem.

The freeze is quite severe: VLC locks up (spinning beachball). I can get to other apps by dragging VLC's fullscreen window out of the way, but what's really scary is that if I try to force-quit VLC, either from the Dock or using kill -KILL from the Terminal, the whole machine freezes! No mouse movement, no caps lock, no clock, no nothing. (I can't telnet in to check; the kernel may still be up coz I don't get the kernel panic screen, but everything else seems dead.) Even stranger, after VLC has locked up, I try to get its PID in the Terminal with 'ps', and that hangs too. Nothing relevant in system.log or console.log after rebooting.

Mac OS X 10.2.8, VLC 0.8.1.

I can't spot this issue in previous topic questions (some similar ones are on Windows, which I assume must have a different cause). Is this a known issue? If not, is there anything more I can tell you?

[beckyz]

Hi
I have the same problem