I bought a DVD secondhand and tried watching it on my PC using VLC, which has worked fine for my other DVDs. This particular disc consistently crashes or freezes about an hour into the movie. I cleaned the disc, although it already looked nearly pristine, but that did not help.
The same DVD plays normally in a standalone DVD player, including past the section where VLC fails. I also could not rip it with MakeMKV, and another disc-reading application reported an error, so the issue seems related to how the PC drive reads this particular disc. Would trying another media player help, or is the problem more likely the disc or the computer's DVD drive?
4 Answers
The failure may happen at the point where the DVD changes from its first layer to its second. Some computer drives struggle with that transition even when a standalone player handles it normally. Try creating a complete disc image; it may take a while at the troublesome section, but if it succeeds, you could play the image instead.
DVD region settings can also prevent or interfere with playback. Check that the disc's geographic region matches the drive, although a region mismatch usually causes problems earlier rather than at a specific point in the movie.
Try the disc in a different DVD drive, ideally an external USB drive. That will help determine whether your computer's internal drive is having trouble with this disc. If it works externally, the internal drive may be aging or less tolerant of certain discs.
Testing another media player is reasonable. VLC may not be the cause, but trying a different DVD-capable player such as one from the K-Lite package can quickly rule out a software-specific problem. Since MakeMKV and another reading tool also failed, though, the drive or disc format is more suspicious than VLC itself.
That sounds like a good way to test whether the internal drive is the problem. Thanks!