Thanks for all the suggestions. I stumbled across the Ogle-User mailing list archives and doing looking through every month I found my problem. Seems that there is a bug with IDE CD code in the kernel and certain DVD drives (particularly Matshita in notebooks). The fix is to use ide-scsi. The only problem with that is the 2.4.21 kernel (which I'm using wouldn't you know it) has DMA disabled because it was causing problems. Guess I'll have to wait until the 2.6 series before things work perfectly. At least now I can view DVDs. Thanks again for all the ideas.