dvd playback spin questions

Apologies for a newbie question, but I've noticed that during dvd movie playback my drive (a dvd rw in an R61) has a tendency to spin up and down repeatedly--every 5-10 seconds or so. I'm used to the drive remaining silent for a good bit of playback time, so I'm just wondering if this is normal in newer, faster drives.

Right now this spin up/ spin down happens whether I'm using Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic. I did notice that it's not as much a problem using the VLC player, but the somewhat glitchy video on that player makes this fix less than desirable.

Any suggestions for a different fix? Again, I'm new to the world of MPEGS and codecs, but could it be a matter of updating codecs for the media player?

I don't think it's a problem with the drive itself as it's been operating fine--playing music, burning both cd's and dvd's.

Thanks for any help.

 

Yeah, my drive spins up like that too, but rather every few minutes as it spins up the disc to fill up the cache and when it stops the drive when the cache is filled and you are playing the movie from there. Maybe you could try to increase the amount of RAM/Cache used by your player.

 

This sounds logical, thanks for the reply. Any ideas how to increase the amount of cache either of these players utilizes?

 

I just downloaded a trial of dvdidle:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/DVDIdle.htm

This seems to have fixed the problem!

 

Hmm, dvdidle is pretty annoying in free trial mode (a constant pop-up during playback once dvd has been cached). I can't really see spending $20 on the software though. We'll see--it'll be a fight between my tightwad-ness and my OCD.

Anybody have other suggestions?