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[CraigNZ]

Several movies are locking up MC at the beginning of the movie.  For example, "Great Expectations" starts by showing the Universal leadin then the program freezes on a blank screen.  I have to use System Manager to close the program.  Some movies will freeze immediately, displaying only a blank screen, others will start to play and then freeze within a few seconds.

I then tried Windows Media Center and it does the same thing on these movies.  But when I try PowerDVD 13 it works fine.  The difference (Great Expectations movie) is when the Universal lead in finishes the next display is a Warning message and copyright notice.  This displays okay on PowerDVD but not on Windows Media Center or JRiver.

I tried various versions of MC (going back to 128 but it made no difference).  I normally use ROHQ but switched back to RO .. but no difference.

I then looked at the filters and noticed that DVD Navigator is common to both RO and ROHQ, and DVD Navigator would be used by WMC but probably not PowerDVD.  So this may be the fault that DVD Navigator has either been updated recently in a Windows update or it is not able to work with some DVD movies.

So to test this I am looking to see if there is a why to bypass or replace DVD Navigator with something else.

[CraigNZ]

As a follow up, I tried each of these movies on my IPAD using DLNA and the program nPlayer, all play perfectly.  So the movie folders are okay.

[CraigNZ]

I think I found the problem.  If I move any of the problem movies to my C drive, they play perfectly.  Turns out the drives that all work okay are 2 TB or less in size.  The drives with the problem movies are on drives bigger than 2 TB.  This may explain why both JRiver and WMC fail but not PowerDVD.

Has this been discovered before and is there a way to manage movies on very large drives?

[CountryBumkin]

When you tested with PDVD13 where you running on a different drive/location? PDVD should not be able to read a larger than 2TB drive either if it is a drive setup issue. See this Microsoft article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2581408

[Hendrik]

When you tested with PDVD13 where you running on a different drive/location? PDVD should not be able to read a larger than 2TB drive either if it is a drive setup issue. See this Microsoft article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2581408

Who said its a drive setup issue?
Its very well possible that a specific piece of software simply doesn't work above 2TB, for the same reason you need a specific setup to make them work properly, but otherwise unrelated.

In any case, Microsoft designed the DVD Navigator to play DVDs from an optical drive, so the 2TB problem is most likely not a case they really had in mind.
Sadly, MC has to rely on the DVD Navigator because implementing your own would be month of work, in addition to the license costs for even getting access to the required documentation to do it.

You could of course try to bug Microsoft since their own application also fails, but i don't have much hope to be honest.

[CraigNZ]

Now that I know what the problem is, there are several solutions.  One, backup the movies as ISO files instead of DVD folders.  I tested this and it works okay.  Apparently the virtual drive software can handle the large sector addresses and the player software sees a 7 GB file space.  Another solution is to partition the large drives into smaller drives, never tried that, not sure if it works.  And of course another is to use 2 TB drives for DVDs and 4 TB drives for Bluray movies (ISO) .

I think PowerDVD use their own filter and can handle the larger drive sizes (sector addresses).  It did play the movies directly from the larger drives.