DVD and video playback issues

I have fw 3.3u and dvdx is installed. The problems I'm having is that DVDs take forever to load, 5min or more, and I've only managed to wait long enough for one movie to start playing. Second, hoping to avoid the excessive load times, I tried putting files on the SD card (mpg, mp4, etc, not DVD files), but they came up all garbled like it was being decoded improperly.

Is there something wrong with my setup or something? Which player is the best one to use? I tried a few and got the same issues, so I'm kinda at a loss here. Any advice would be helpful. It's not a big deal if I can't get this working, but it would be nice.

use good DVD media, and SLOW burning speeds... I use Verbatim and burn at 4x - works fine for me!

These problems have actually arisen with commercial DVDs, but I will try burning one and see it that works any better.

Should I leave out menus? I saw another post where someone had said that loading the menu made for a big performance hit....

Yeah, don't use libnavigate or whatever the option for having menus is, it takes a while longer to load. And it already takes a while to decode the CSS protection each time. Dunno why you're having problems with media on SD though.