Vista - DVD Playback Problems

To cut a long story short, the DVD will only play for 5-10 minutes before freezing up, if I wait it'll start again about 5 minutes later...this happens in VLC player, windows media player classic and Media player (with Roxio encoder). Which says to me it is the drive?

I'm running Vista Business 64-bit and the drive is a Samsung SH-S223F...

Any help?

Having only herd the short story I am pron to agree with you about it being the ROM.

Have you tried playing a cd or burn something to see what if anything the ROM will do?

You could try using a CD/DVD with data and see if you can copy all of it.
If that works atleast you can rule out the possibility that you'd have to replace your DVD drive. If that fails however I'd throw it in the trash and get a new one.. they're like what? 10? 20? bucks nowadays anyway.

Otherwise you could try de-installing the drivers for your dvd drive and re-installing them.

And if that doesn't work (if it's an older model) you might want to look into flashing (updating) the firmware. I do however not recommend doing this without having read proper instructions as doing so might ruin your dvd drive if done incorrectly.
Also you have to be lucky for your device to have updated downloadable firmware at all.

Good luck though!