Recent poor DVD playback performance

[Philip Walden]

I have FC5 and recently my DVD playback has tanked.

Both xine and mplayer (from livna and greysector repos respectively) act 
like they cannot read the dvd fast enough. Xine plays for about 10 
seconds and then freezes for a a second or two, plays some more and then 
freezes again. Meanwhile the disk led is dark with minimal activity. The 
same thing happens with a mounted DVD in the DVD-ROM drive. So it is not 
my disk. Mplayer complains that "Your system is too SLOW to play this!"

It is a 800Mhz athlon with 256MB memory and a nvidia tnt2 AGP using the 
nv driver. Although it is older machine, this system was great at 
playing DVDs up until a couple of weeks ago. So I suspect a yum update 
might have done something. Before this, I have been playing DVDs on it 
happily for a couple of years from RH9, to FC4 and now FC5.

Anyone have some ideas for me to try oir areas to explore?

Philip