Problem during Blu Ray playback

[htpc_user]

Saturday while watching Drillbit Taylor on blu ray, I had a strange problem.  At one point, the movie started playing the same part over and over (for example, Drillbit looked at the guy in front of him, turned his head to the left then kept playing that part over and over…like it was rewinding, playing, rewinding, playing).  But the audio kept going fine.  Nothing would get it out of this.  I tried hitting “Next”, “Previous”, even skipping to a chapter further ahead.  The real kicker is I tried stopping the movie, going back to the PowerDVD screen and hitting Play again.  When it came back up, you could hear the audio of the menu and you could see the words to the menu, like “Play”, “Setup”, “Scene Selection”, etc., but the background (which was video) was completely blank.  If I went ahead and started the movie, the movie was also blank.  I tried exiting out of PowerDVD and bringing it back up, but it did the same thing.  I had to restart the computer completely and then start the movie again.  At this point everything was back to normal.  Anyone else experienced this?

I think I know why the movie started stuttering; I have a theory anyway.  This also happened the very first time I tried out a movie after installing the drive.  That time I left SageTV running with PowerDVD over top of it.  SageTV’s screensaver came up over PowerDVD and when I moved the mouse to get rid of Sage’s screensaver and it went back to PowerDVD (playing the movie) I saw that it was stuttering with the audio still going.  Since then, I had set the options in PowerDVD to “Always be on top”.  When Drillbit Taylor messed up and I stopped PowerDVD, I saw that the SageTV screen saver was up again.  So my theory is that this screen saver is messing up PowerDVD’s playback regardless of whether PowerDVD is set to be on top or not.  I just don’t know why I had the problem with the video being blank.

Other things I noticed during watching Drillbit.  Last night while watching, occasionally it would break up, much like when watching over-the-air digital channels and you lose the signal a little and the picture breaks up.  Sunday morning we finished watching it and never experienced any kind of problems; it was completely smooth.  The other thing I noticed was that the audio seemed to be “off” with the video on this movie.  I did not experience that with The Forbidden Kingdom.  Sometimes it seemed to be OK on Drillbit, but other times it seemed off.

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