DVD video playback freezes

[kbates]

Just in case folks are still monitoring this forum...

My DVD player died and is out for repair, so I decided to try watching a DVD on the Mac Mini running SageTV (v6.6.2.1) and immediately ran into two problems. First, I could not access the DVD from the Mac. All that appeared in the Finder was a "Remote DVD". No way to eject, play, or anything else.

Since SageTV was still running, my assumption was that it had taken over the DVD, so I went to Sage and sure enough, I was able to play the DVD. The problem I ran into with Sage is that every 2-3 minutes the DVD video would freeze but the audio kept playing. Doing a Pause and Continue brought things back into sync, but this clearly is not a good solution.

So, two questions if anyone might be able to help:

1. How do I prevent Sage from taking control of the DVD so that I can watch things on the Apple DVD player? I have to keep Sage running in case there are shows that might be recording, so exiting Sage isn't an acceptable solution. Some changes in Sage.properties perhaps to prevent it from taking over the DVD?

2. If I must use SageTV to watch the DVD, any idea about why the video freezes and how to correct it? Happens on lots of DVDs, so nothing special about the DVDs, and it's very strange that the video freezes but the audio continues playing.

Thanks in advance for any advice or help,

- Ken