I was surprised to find a classic silent movie on DVD at the Dearborn Public Library. I was eager to watch it, but when I returned home and tried to play it, the Mac's DVD Player opens and the FBI Warning appears, but the Player (v.4.6.5) goes into a state of perpetual pinwheel.

I've been experiencing many crashes of late, so I was relieved that after a Force Quit, I was able to eject the disk, and the Player will play other DVDs just fine. The problem is obviously in the disk, but after examining it with a magnifying glass, I could see no dirt or scratches.

As it would cost me $30 to order the same DVD (perhaps with the same result) I'm eager to try and get this one to work. Are there any tricks or techniques you would suggest to get a recalcitrant disk to play? I've already tried rubbing it on my shirt.

It may well be a bad DVD, Keith. I went through either 2 or 3 copies of the last restored version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis with Amazon before I told them to just cancel it. The disks looked fine, but there was apparently a bad run. They would play about half way through, then hang.

This is a real nasty one. Being a glutton for punishment, I've tried everything I could think of, including double-clicking the DVD icon and attempting to play the individual chapters. I succeeded with one (both sound and picture) by using the marvelous VLC player, but on the second, I experienced a dead-mouse, stopped-clock, Desktop-fell-on-the-floor crash. It's amazing that a simple movie could cause such havoc. I'll likely soon be back bawling that my Mac don't work no more.

I must go now and Relaunch the Finder.

Crappy media will do that. Check the console log, and you'll most likely find a lot of I/O errors and retries.

Have you tried extracting it via Handbrake or FastDVD Copy (there's another one too, but I can't remember the name)? Maybe you could get a viewable copy.

The computer would have to be able to read the disk in order to copy even a portion of it. To my knowledge, there's nothing you can do with bad media.

quote:

Originally posted by Donna:
Have you tried extracting it via Handbrake or FastDVD Copy (there's another one too, but I can't remember the name)? Maybe you could get a viewable copy.

Right. If the bad media is causing I/O errors that are enough to hang up the system, then none of the tools are going to be able to extract anything from the drive.

I found that if I but gave the individual files on the DVD enough time to load so that I could see the file names in a Finder window –and "enough time" proved to be about 40 minutes of spinning pinwheel– I could then use the marvelous VLC app to convert the individual files to the MPG format. I then used iSquint to convert the files a second time to MP4. (Neither app could do the entire job on its own.) Using this method, each file takes about 65 minutes to convert, and this is the only time that I've seen that both the processors of my ol' Dual-1.25Ghz Mirrored-Driveway are being used 100%. (There is now no need to use the space heater in this room.)

It's amazing what you can do once you put your mind to it. Of course, I would never have known about the free VLC application had not Jack (or was it Phyllis?) recommended it. I'll gratefully buy both you guys a beer, and I've sent a generous (generous for me, at least) donation to VLC's French creator, because I think VLC is the best, most versatile application I have. It does everything QuickTime should do.

One thing worth noting is that once we see the spinning pinwheel for 30 seconds or more and we see the notice "Application not responding," we think That's it! Time to Force Quit or Reboot! But occasionally, and in this case it took 40 minutes, if you simply leave the computer alone, things'll work themselves out. It's tough to do, because we always wanna be fiddling with it, trying to control the situation, but sometimes, just walking away from the problem is a better approach.

The movie I am ripping is "Intolerance" by D. W. Griffith, and I had been adamant about not buying it, because despite that Griffith died intestate before I was born, I hold his previous film, "Birth of a Nation," to be highly offensive, and I didn't wish to support his heirs and assigns in any way. But "Intolerance" is different (humanistic) and quite good. I had also borrowed the DVD of Mike Judge's acclaimed comedy "Office Space" from the library, but I couldn't make it through that movie. Instead, I stayed-up late watching each segment of "Intolerance" in fascination.

In following this discussion I see no evidence that this DVD has been tried in an ordinary DVD player. Only evidence that the DVD player in the computer cannot deal with it. I would be interested to kinow if the library from which it was borrowed can (or has ever been able to) play it on their DVD player. I have had a DVD that would play fine on one DVD player but not another, or would play on a DVD player but not in the computer and visa versa.

DVDs and CDs on loan from libraries can and do become damaged. DVDs that I have encountered that would not play on my computer would also not play on either of two standalone DVD players in my home. Today, I checked out a 10 CD audiobook from our library. I'm ripping it with iTunes so I can copy it to one of my iPods. Fortunately, it's a short story anthology, because 2 of the tracks on the second CD are damaged. I've made a note of the damaged tracks so I can let the library staff know.

I'd be interested to see if you're getting a lot of errors/retries in your log. You could very well be shorting the life of your DVD drive dramatically.

As I said, the library's DVD looks to be in mint condition. (I don't think there's much call among my neighbors for silent movies.) I suspect that the company, Kino Video, that manufactured this DVD may be the same one that made the DVD of "Metropolis" that wouldn't play for Phyllis.

Unfortunately, I am (a.) too parsimonious, (b.) technophobic, and (c.) easily bored to purchase a regular DVD player, so I can't test the disk on another machine. (My television – usually off – is a 1984 Curtis-Mathis.) The only other disk my Mac wouldn't play was a Video CD I had made using Toast. It may have played on a DVD player, but I'll never know.

VisualHub is still grinding-out the last of the chapters of "Intolerance." I hope the Mac doesn't blow a head gasket.

Jack, my knowledge of audio CD players is that what usually goes bad on them is not the motor, not the lens, not the laser, nor the electronics, but the transport. I would assume that to be the case with my Mac's optical drive as well. Once the information from the disk showed as files in the Finder, there was no longer much demand on the transport. The DVD disk has long ago been returned to its case, and oddly enough, at no time did I hear the optical drive spinning. There may have been huge demands on my RAM, CPUs and HD, but whether this may have a deleterious effect, I am not qualified to say.

That's why I mentioned looking at the log. Did you?

Jack, the DVD Player's Crash Log is 570 lines long since January 26, but that seems no more than in previous periods. There's a much longer list in early June of 2006. The app has always crashed a lot, but I watch few DVDs, so it doesn't bother me. I only wish that QuickTime wouldn't crash so much.

Now that I look at them, all the applications I use frequently have much larger crash logs. Is there something I should (or can) do about this? I run various utilities regularly.

The worst crashing I ever experienced was when I subscribed to Version Tracker. It would crash immediately on launching. I sent their tech-support desk a copy of my crash log, and they didn't know what to make of it, so they refunded my money. This year, I signed-up for Mac Update, which hasn't crashed once.

I'm running system 10.4.8 which seems far more stable than previous versions.

I'm not talking about the crash log. I'm talking about the console log. That and the system log are where you will see transient I/O errors.

The console log is much, much shorter, but it only goes back two days. For yesterday, when I was having the DVD problem, there is nothing in the console log about the DVD Player.

In the system log, there are many lines about "stealth mode connection attempt to TCP . . ." and also "failed in AppleLegacyAudio/AppleTexas2Audio/AppleTexas2Audio.cpp". Would this last have any bearing on my chronic problem of audio setttings reverting to mono, 32KHz? I just checked Audio MIDI Setup again, and the Format settings had changed to 48KHz. That's really bothersome. What can I do about that?

You won't necessarily see an entry for the DVD player - you might see something about I/O errors, sector errors, retries, etc. There's also the system log to log at.

Since I have no idea what "AppleTexas2Audio" is, I don't know if that's causing your problem, but the reports I have read have always been that some third-party application decides it needs to change the settings and doesn't change them back when done. Running GarageBand will usually force then back to normal (or, of course, just doing it yourself. You may even have some device plugged in (or had one at one point) with a driver that's changing the settings.

As a final chapter to this, I took the DVDs back to the library today, and I pointedly told the clerk at the desk my problem and asked if the DVD would play on the library's computer. I he promptly tried it, and it didn't play (although I was disappointed that their Dell didn't crash).

Jack, what about "stealth mode connection attempt to TCP . . ."? that sounds sinister. Does that refer to someone attempting to skulk into my computer?

That's not enough of a log entry for me to say anything one way or another.